The darker side of being a doctor \ stacker news ~tech

The darker side of being a doctor drericlevi.substack.com/p/the-darker-side-of-being-a-doctor

This link was posted by m-ahmed 1 hour ago on HN. It received 159 points and 85 comments.

Absent this article, points (1) and (2) require knowing a doctor to fully appreciate. But the last point is visible to me (and probably anyone) as a progressively infrequent patient:

I am realising more and more that what brings me greatest distress is the relentless administrative pressure which take away the meaningful clinical engagement I have with my patients. And I wonder if this is what many young doctors are experiencing as well. Medicine used to be a meaningful pursuit. Now it has become a tiresome industry. The joy, purpose and meaning of medicine has been codified, sterilised, protocolised, industrialised and regimented. Doctors are caught in a web of business, no longer a noble vocation. The altruism of young doctors have been replaced by the shackles of efficiency, productivity and key performance indicators.

Going to the doctor these days feels like visiting a used car dealership. My guard is up calculating all the potential conflicts, ready to say "no" as fast as I might need to. At high mental frequency I'm inoculating myself against the guilt trip of not seeking increasing levels of care. I wonder how much of this is an over-modernization of medicine, a scramble to keep up with change, and how much of this results from quasi-controlled medical care and prices squeezing the competition and profitability out of medicine.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 14 Apr

To some hospitals and their business, I’m not a Surgeon. I’m just an employee. Overworked, burned out, replaceable. The noble call to Medicine has been suffocated by the bureaucratic force exerting itself as the medical industry.

This isn't the sad reality of your profession, it's almost the same in every job.

I am a teacher, have worked for various privately owned schools and colleges. I can resonate the same, being overworked, Burned out, replaceable, thought like a machine, only given tasks to complete the syllabus much before the time and then neglected, used in other work like advertising for the schools etc. etc.

Those who use noble professions for the benifit of their business are not human beings for me, they are cruel and dishonest and a stain on our race.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @wingalt 14 Apr

Kind of interesting that the burn-out and distress of doctors looks alike everywhere in the world, there must be a better way what are we missing? On the heavier and heavier administrative workload it looks like the inflation of administrative staff looking for work to do, quite reminiscent to the growing amount of university admins vs teaching and research staff

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @erict875 14 Apr

On the loss of meaning — It's funny because I once had a casual conversation with a stranger, who happened to be an NHS doctor, and he had the exact same complaints...

To make things worse, the once sacred doctor-patient relationship has completely lost its meaning. We've seen during the pandemic, in some parts of the world, that doctors were forbidden to issue certain legitimate prescriptions, which confirms the author's assessment that

It’s no longer about the patient. It’s about the business of hospitals.

(And big pharma — my addition)

Dr John Campbell on Youtube does not miss an opportunity to complain about this sad fact.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 13 Apr

That’s pretty scary