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Physician Burnout and Financial Independence: A Guest Post

By Jimmy Turner, MD
The Physician Philosopher

This week’s “Wellness Wednesday” post has two changes.  1) It wasn’t posted on Wednesday (Tuesday!), and 2) It’s not on this site!  You’ll have to venture over to Camp FIRE finance to find the article.  It will be well worth your trip as I discuss tough topics on physician burnout, physician suicide, and how financial independence may have the means to save our doctors in United States. To see the whole post, click here.  It’s worth the read whether you are a doctor or not! Here is a couple of exerpts from the article.

First, why you should care:

…burnout rates and suicide rates are climbing, too. Physicians have the highest rate of suicide of any profession.  Dr. Pamela Wible, one of the leaders in this arena, has compiled a list of nearly 1,000 doctors who have killed themselves. These catastrophic events impact more than just the physicians and their families, too. Medical errors occur more often in overworked and burned out physicians.

Why Financial Independence May Help

At first glance, you might think that I am making the point that “as long as doctors earn enough money, these problems won’t bother them.”  That couldn’t be further from what I am saying. Financial Independence reliably provides some direct counter action to the causes of burnout listed above.  It doesn’t fix all of the problems, but it does help with many of them. I’ll mention three specific remedies that FI provides:
Go check out the article and let me know what you think.  Hate it?  Love it?  Leave a comment on the Camp FIRE Finance website. Until next Wednesday! TPP

2 Comments

  1. Side Hustle Scrubs

    This is a great post! It should be mandatory reading for your residents before they graduate.

    FIRE is much more about freedom than it is about leaving medicine. The ability to cut back hours or take a different job that pays less but makes you happier goes a long way towards combatting burnout.

    Reply

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