Wednesday, December 12

Reflections on Primary Care

Just because I haven't written about burnout in a while doesn't mean I don't still care about it.

Over the past year or so, I've become an avid, sympathetic reader of a blog called Reflections of a Millennial Doctor.  The author, M, vividly details her struggle with burnout and giving up on primary care.  She fought so hard this past year, wrestling with whether or not to stay in her current practice or throw in the towel and try her hand at something else.  She recently admitted that she will be leaving her practice soon for a job as a hospitalist.  I can relate - not to the hospitalist part! I hate hospital medicine.  But her tale of getting bled dry by her clinic job resonated with me deeply.  Honestly, I don't know how her primary care dreams survived her training.  Mine didn't.

I remember being a medical student and writing an essay about the importance of trajectory change for my family medicine residency application.