The medical profession needs to do a total rework if it’s training and work patterns / work ethic. From what I know, it is totally unhinged.
The training system was developed by William Halsted, a pioneering surgeon who worked at Johns Hopkins hospital in the late 19th and early 20th century. Halsted battled addiction throughout his career, even as he revolutionized surgery by developing new surgical techniques, advancing anesthesia and promoting infection control. He became hooked on cocaine in 1884 while conducting experiments with the drug. …
“This man created a culture where you lived in the hospital,” says Michael Maddaus, a retired surgeon who developed a narcotics addiction while working as a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota. “Part of the ethos of that is you don’t complain … You just do your work and shut up and have discipline to be strong and pretend you’re OK when everything’s not.” …
In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which oversees medical training in the US, ruled that trainees could work a maximum of 80 hours a week in clinical care. The first time that any national limit had been set on trainee work hours, it cut into the 100-hour-plus weeks that were often the norm for surgical trainees. …
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She looked out at the audience filled with 2,000 of her peers, surgeons who were attending the annual meeting of the Association of Academic Surgery, a prestigious gathering of specialists from universities across the United States and Canada.
For years, no one in surgery talked publicly about mental distress in the profession; surgeons have long experienced a culture of silence when it comes to their personal pain.
“This man created a culture where you lived in the hospital,” says Michael Maddaus, a retired surgeon who developed a narcotics addiction while working as a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota.
Surgeons often fall into a trap of feeling like what they do “needs to be superhuman because they are the last line of defense, if you will, for a patient”, says Colin West, a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic who specializes in physician wellbeing.
Lorna Breen, an emergency room doctor in New York, died by suicide in April 2020, after telling her family that she worried she would lose her medical license, or be ostracized by her colleagues, because she was suffering anguish from her work on the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis.
With Barkley’s sister in the front row, Cunningham told her story in full, describing her tennis career and depression, and showed an image of the online message saying she’d been found temporarily unfit for practice.
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