For several years now, I’ve been the social media curmudgeon in medicine. In a 2011 New York Times op-ed titled “Don’t Quit This Day Job”, I argued that working part-time or leaving medicine goes against our obligation to patients and to the American taxpayers who subsidize graduate medical education to the tune of $15 billion per year.

But today, eight years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, I’m more sympathetic to the physicians who are giving up on medicine by cutting back on their work hours or leaving the profession altogether. Experts cite all kinds of reasons for the malaise in American medicine:  burnout, user-unfriendly electronic health records, declining pay, loss of autonomy. I think the real root cause lies in our country’s worsening anti-intellectualism.

Read the Full Article

Once again, it’s Physician Anesthesiologists Week, and it’s a great time to celebrate our specialty’s many successes and accomplishments.

But we’re wasting an opportunity if we don’t also take this week to consider the state of the specialty today, and what it could or should mean to be a physician anesthesiologist 20 or 30 years from now.

There is no question that a seismic shift is underway in healthcare. Look at how many private anesthesiology groups have been bought out by—or lost contracts to—large groups and corporations; look at how many hospitals have gone bankrupt or been absorbed into large integrated health systems. Mergers like CVS with Aetna are likely to redefine care delivery networks. Where does a physician anesthesiologist fit into this new world?

An even better question to ask is this: Is your group or practice running pretty much as it did 20 years ago? If so, then my guess is that you are in for a rude awakening sometime soon. One of two scenarios may be in play:  either your leadership is running out the clock until retirement and in no mood to change, or your leadership hasn’t yet been able to convince your group that it can no longer practice in the same expensive, antiquated model. As one academic chair said ruefully, at a recent meeting, “They’re like frogs being slowly boiled. They just don’t feel what’s happening.”

Read the Full Article

Emory University held graduation ceremonies on August 5 for the 2017 Class of Anesthesiologist Assistants (AAs), who received Masters of Medical Science degrees. While the traditional academic regalia can’t fail to evoke Harry Potter in the minds of many of us, there is some magic in the processional and the music that always makes graduation a moving, meaningful event. I had the honor of delivering the commencement address, reprinted here.

Distinguished faculty, graduates, honored guests:

It is a great pleasure and an honor to be here, and to congratulate all the graduates of the Emory University Class of 2017 on your tremendous accomplishment. Just think about all you have learned in the past two years! You’ve transformed yourselves into real anesthesia professionals, able to deliver first-class care to patients at some of the most critical times in their lives.

Today is a great time to become an anesthesiologist assistant. Just two days ago, Dr. Jerome Adams was confirmed as our country’s Surgeon General. He is the first-ever physician anesthesiologist to have that honor. Even better, he is from Indiana, where he was the State Health Commissioner, and of course Indiana is among the states where CAAs are licensed to practice. We know that Dr. Adams understands the principles of the anesthesia care team. Dr. Adams gets it – who AAs are, what you do, and how well qualified you are to care for your patients.

Another happy thought – the Secretary of Health and Human Services today is Dr. Tom Price from Georgia, an orthopedic surgeon, and a former Representative in Congress. His wife, Betty, is a physician anesthesiologist who currently serves in the Georgia state legislature.

Whatever your opinions about politics (and believe me, we’re not going there today), whether your blood runs red or blue, I think we can all celebrate the fact that we now have people in key positions who understand anesthesia; whose presence in Washington is great for AAs, for patients, and for the practice of safe, team-based anesthesia care.

All About Great Medical Discoveries

As I thought about what to say to you today, the first thing that occurred to me is that this summer marks 30 years since I finished my anesthesia training. You might be curious to know if I ever had any second thoughts, any regrets about that career choice. My answer is a resounding “no”.

I was lucky enough to get interested in anesthesia at an early age. I brought something to show you. This book was published in 1960. It’s called All About Great Medical Discoveries, and I read it when I was a little girl about 8 or 9 years old, in Amarillo, Texas. Here’s what it had to say about anesthesia, in a chapter called “The Conquest of Pain”:

Read the Full Article

Did it ever occur to some of today’s physicians that many people work awfully hard and complain a lot less than they do about “burnout” and “work-life balance”?

Did it ever occur to them that “work-life balance” is the very definition of a first-world problem, unique to a very privileged class of highly educated people, most of whom are white?

Every day, I go to work and see the example of the nurses and technicians who work right alongside me in tough thoracic surgery cases. Zanetta, for instance, is the single mother of five children. She leaves her 12-hour shift at 7 p.m. and then faces a 60-mile commute to get home. She never complains, and unfailingly takes the extra moment to get a warm blanket for a patient or cheerfully help out a colleague. When I leave work, I see the gardeners who arrive in battered pickup trucks and mow lawns in the Los Angeles summer heat for slim pay and no benefits. I can’t imagine these people wasting time worrying about work-life balance. They’re too busy working.

Or look at what it’s like to work in one of the world’s top restaurants. Edward Frame, now a graduate student in social research, described his first job in a Michelin-starred kitchen for an article in the New York Times.

“I worked in a small alcove, connected to the dishwasher,” he wrote. “Glass racks came out, I wiped away any watermarks or smudges, and then, just as I finished one rack, another appeared. This went on for hours, like some kind of Sisyphean fable revised for the hospitality industry. By hour two my fingers hurt and my back ached. But I couldn’t stop. The racks kept coming. Slowing down never occurred to me. There wasn’t time. I needed to make it nice. I wanted to make it nice.”

Let’s face it—a lot of people have jobs much worse than being a physician. Apparently, they don’t expect to be coddled or to receive much sympathy about their rate of burnout, or their lack of “work-life balance”. Nor do they expect that workplace expectations will be altered just to suit them.

I can’t imagine having the gall to complain about how tough it is to be a physician when all you have to do is open your eyes and see what’s all around us:  people working incredibly hard, making far less money than we do, and then returning home to face the responsibilities of family life, child care, housework, home maintenance, and everything else.

We—physicians—thankfully can afford help with these tasks. The Medscape Physician Compensation Report for 2015 reported that the average compensation for a primary care physician was $195,000 and for a specialist $284,000.

When I was a new faculty member making an instructor’s salary right after residency, it’s true that I didn’t have a lot of take-home pay left after I made monthly payments for student loans, private pre-school for two children, housecleaning help, and a full-time nanny to provide transportation and after-school care. The full-time nanny was essential because a child with a bad cold or an upset stomach needs to stay home, and a physician can’t drop everything to stay home too. These were investments that my husband and I made because we felt that being a physician is important work.

But in medicine, the prevailing wisdom today is that the rigorous culture of the past needs to change—along with the expectation of dedication to duty, long work hours, and stoicism—because it’s all just too difficult and we risk getting burned out.

Now Stanford University has started a new “time-banking” program designed to ease pressure on faculty physicians and basic science professors. As admiringly described by reporter Brigid Schulte in the Washington Post, the program allows faculty members to “bank” hours that they spend on uncompensated activities such as committee work and earn credits to use for support services at home or work.

Dr. Gregory Gilbert, an emergency physician who was the poster child for the Post article, used his credits for delivery of meals to his home, housecleaning services, and employing a “life coach” to help him “find better balance in his life”.

Wait just a minute. I’m sure that Dr. Gilbert is a good person—a divorced father trying to be a conscientious physician and spend time with his children. He must be a smart guy if he’s on the faculty at Stanford. Do you mean to tell me that Dr. Gilbert couldn’t figure out how to order food delivery and arrange for housecleaning before Stanford came up with this program?

Read the Full Article

Dr. Margaret Wood, who chairs the Department of Anesthesiology at Columbia University Medical Center, has published a wonderful article titled “Women in Medicine:  Then and Now“, in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia.

I think I speak for many of us in admitting that Anesthesia and Analgesia doesn’t occupy a prominent place on my bedside table. Many readers may have missed Dr. Wood’s article. That’s a shame, because it isn’t just about anesthesiology, and speaks to issues in medicine independent of specialty or gender. Here are some of my favorite passages about lessons she learned over the course of her long and successful career:

“1. It is important to have a passion for what you do if you strive for excellence. If you have that passion, then the efforts do not feel like a sacrifice and “burnout” is not an issue. I cannot imagine that Virginia Apgar spent a single moment talking, thinking, or worrying about burnout.

2. The current fashion to complain about “life balance” can be self-destructive; however, pacing oneself is critical. You can have it all, just not all at once. The Chairman of Anatomy gave the inaugural lecture to my incoming class of medical students. His thesis was that as a physician/medical student you could have (i) an active time-consuming social life, (ii) a family, and (iii) a career, but to be successful you should have no more than two of these at the same time. I believe this to be true and have followed this advice since.

3. Women should be careful not to fall into the trap of feeling entitled to special considerations or engage in special pleadings. Our patients want their physician to be the best, whatever his or her sex. There is no room for a physician of either sex who is less qualified or less committed because of outside responsibilities.

4. Women no longer need to “prove themselves” against the sea of doubters who dominated medicine 40 years ago. Fortunately, we are now past that point and such doubts, are I hope, antediluvian. Women are where they are today, however, because many of us felt that demonstrating that women really could “do it” was a moral imperative and one to which we were fully committed.

5. Parents need to manage their work and family responsibilities to ensure that both receive their full attention. This will often mean ensuring that they have excellent childcare to allow them to have the confidence to focus on work when that is required. This may be expensive, but it is a critical investment by both parents in their family’s future. Successfully raising children is a joint responsibility of both partners; what is critical to women is also critical to men, and vice versa. Women starting out on this journey can be assured that it is possible to raise well-adjusted children in a home in which both partners have challenging and successful careers, provided there is a true partnership in the family.”

Is Dr. Wood a curmudgeon, or perhaps a dinosaur? That could be, but I find her honesty refreshing.

Read the Full Article