Simon G. Talbot, MD

Simon G. Talbot is a plastic surgeon.

February 25, 2023Feb 25, 2023

An excerpt from If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First. In late March 2021, during a lull between the third and fourth waves of the coronavirus pandemic,…

An excerpt from If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First.

In late March 2021, during a lull between the third and fourth waves of the coronavirus pandemic, I drove to the small town three hours west of the Mississippi River where a physician I’ll call Rita Gallardo lives. Three hundred miles from the center of the contiguous …

Physician

In the burnout epidemic, is mindfulness the new opioid?

Simon G. Talbot, MD & Walter J. O’Donnell, MD & Wendy Dean, MD

November 1, 2020Nov 1, 2020

At a recent annual exam for one of us (Walter), the medical assistant had checked heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and oxygen saturation. Inquiring cheerfully about the Fifth Vital Sign, she flashed the 10-point pain scale of emojis ranging from beaming to grimacing. The only mention-worthy pain was an occasionally aching meniscus from a forgettable high school football career.

It was refreshing that she didn’t ask about burnout. Everyone else was. …

Physician

Mindfulness as a diagnostic tool, not a treatment

Simon G. Talbot, MD & Wendy Dean, MD

July 27, 2020Jul 27, 2020

The ongoing COVID crisis in the U.S. has highlighted our broken heath care system. And with it, has come an opportunity to begin to fix the system. Some touted mindfulness as a panacea pre-COVID – suggesting that if clinicians reframed the situations around them, they could better cope and continue. This backward argument echoes the idea that clinicians should redouble their resilience rather than address the core drivers of their distress. …

Physician

Moral injury in health care: What have we learned?

Simon G. Talbot, MD & Wendy Dean, MD

July 31, 2019Jul 31, 2019

When we began exploring the concept of moral injury to explain the deep distress that U.S. health care professionals feel today, it was something of a thought experiment aimed at erasing the preconceived notions of what was driving the disillusionment…

As physicians, …

Conditions and Diseases

Physicians don’t just suffer burnout. They suffer moral injuries.

Simon G. Talbot, MD & Wendy Dean, MD

August 4, 2018Aug 4, 2018

Physicians on the front lines of health care today are sometimes described as going to battle. It’s an apt metaphor. Physicians, like combat soldiers, often face a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury. Moral injury is frequently…

Moral injury is frequently mischaracterized. In combat veterans it is diagnosed as post-traumatic stress; among physicians it’s portrayed as burnout. But without …