Burnout in the male physician

When I first started writing and speaking about physician burnout, I focused most of my efforts on the female physician — after all, most of my work stems from personal anecdotes, and I am of course a female physician.  I could probably give a talk about women physicians and burnout in my sleep at this point.

Rightfully so, though, as my work spread to wider audiences, more and more men started responding with comments such as, “What makes you think only moms don’t want to miss their kids’ soccer games?,” “Do you think I want to spend 80 hours a week in the hospital?,” or “This health care environment is soul-crushing for all of us, male or female.”  I also started getting lots of emails from spouses of male physicians, expressing that they were seeing signs of burnout in their husbands, and not knowing how to broach the subject.

Honestly, it’s not that I didn’t recognize that male physicians were also experiencing burnout; my husband is a surgeon, and so many of our close friends and family are male physicians.  I ’ve witnessed varying degrees of burnout among many of them and among my male colleagues, but have always been hesitant to write about it, for fear of overstepping boundaries.

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