Category: Non-Clinical Careers

A colleague one town over died recently. After 50 years, he had a huge practice.

His patients say that he often called them on Sundays with results. He loved medicine.

He saw 40 patients one day and died the next.

Doctors used to work until they got too blind or dull to carry on. Seeing more patients was the best way to shake off malaise and stay energized. It gave instant rewards, decent pay and didn’t feel like work most of the time.

Today, old docs say that young docs don’t want to work. The old-timers are partly right, but for the wrong reasons.

Very few doctors can survive old-time clinical medicine: 60 hours a week for 50 years. Modern clinical medicine has too little medicine left in it. Continue reading “How to Energize Your Career or Change It Completely”

Students must understand delayed gratification to succeed in school.

The best students go without food and rest.

They dream of ways to work longer and harder.

Top students use simple math: suffering now equals reward later.

Delayed gratification animates doctors. In some ways, it founds the core of our being.

Delayed gratification presupposes hope of tangible success: meaningful work, autonomy and respect, in a dependable career.

Cuts, Cuts and More Cuts

The early 2000s brought raises for doctors: pay back for a decade of ‘social contract’ cuts through the 1990s. Doctors’ incomes finally caught up with their inflation-adjusted incomes from the ‘90s around 2012.

Politicians called the catch up a gravy train. So they cut fees in: Continue reading “Cuts, Despair & Opportunity”

Dread lies beyond fear and hopelessness. When we see only the certainty of something worse, we sink into a malaise and dread impossible to shake.

Country singers sell songs about heartache and loss, but no one likes songs of foreboding or panic.

Doctors in Ontario need a reason to hope again. They feel desperate. They have been attacked and slandered by government for the last 5 years. Draconian legislation threatens professional autonomy with Bill 41 (nee Bill 210). Docs feel abandoned and do not know who to trust. A malaise rests on doctors as dark as the 1990’s social contract years.

Reason to Hope

Doctors might appear to have it all. Doctors were born with an ability to endure gruelling education, and they get to help people for a living. Doctors never starve to death; only a few go bankrupt. But happiness requires more than a job, good food and a decent car. Continue reading “Are Doctors Trapped in Their Careers?”