What medical students and residents deserve

An anonymous medical student has this post on KevinMD – A star medical student feels like he made a terrible decision. And so, medical students learn quickly how to play this game. We enter noble. We leave jaded. We leave seeing that the smart move is to get out of it. And so the smartest of the smartest, the ones lucky enough to have a choice, go into fields where they limit their involvement with patients: dermatology, radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology. It begs the question: why are these the happiest, the most high-salaried, and patient-limited specialties? They all must have a connection. He goes on to lament how hard many clinicians work and how the other physicians make more money.  He laments has loss of empathy.  He clearly has burnout and possibly depression. Joel Topf has written a quite sarcastic response – I have reproduced it here with translations from pity party to what the little twerp is really thinking. These posts have occupied my thoughts recently.  I was traveling and had much time to think on some very long flights.  While Dr. Topf points out that the post does sound a bit whiny, that is not my dominant concern.  As I wrote in the comments, we (the clinician educators) have to take some of the blame, and our academic leaders have to share that blame. As clinician educators we are role models.  We should be showing students and residents the best of medicine.  We should show how to discuss the science and at the same time discu...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs