Don’t Quit Medicine, Make It Optional: The Burnout Cure They Don’t Teach in Residency
Before we talk about real estate, financial freedom, or making medicine optional, we need to tell the truth about burnout. Burnout is not just being tired. It’s not just needing a vacation. It’s not something that gets fixed by a new doctors’ lounge, a mandatory lecture on resilience, or another email about “prioritizing self-care” from the same system actively setting your inbox on fire. Burnout can do real damage. I worked in a hospitalist group where one of our physicians died by suicide. This wasn’t someone I knew vaguely or passed in the hallway once in a while. This was someone I had worked side-by-side with for years. And around that same time, another hospitalist group affiliated with the hospital where I worked lost a physician to suicide as well. I’m not going to pretend I know the full story behind either death. That would be unfair, and frankly, impossible. Suicide is complex. But I do know what it feels like to work in a system where doctors are expected to keep absorbing more and more until something gives. And sometimes, what gives is devastating. So when we talk about doctor burnout, we need to be honest about the stakes.
