Are Doctors Happy

6 February 2004

 

THE MEDICAL RENAISSANCE GROUP

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Are Doctors Happy?

The traditional allopathic Western model is a prescription for disaster.The more we focus on drugs and surgery for the solution of disease, the more frustrated physicians will get. Doctors dedicated and devoted to their profession are not trained firstly in the Art of healing and secondly in the Nutritional, environmental and Mind Body Medicine which can prevent and also cure disease in an optimal fashion especially if combined judicially with allopathic medicine. Thirdly the hospital system is an alienating process probably for the Doctors who work there as well as the patients who become quickly institutionalised.


But what holds the Medical System to ransome and astronomical costs is the death dealing pharmaceutical system which is like an enormous cartel in league with Governments holding humanity to ransome and treating Human Beings as expendable lives for profit.Particularly is the way thet ignore the needs ot the developing world by neither supplying cheap drugs or evan some assistabce in alleviating suffering

In the developing world, about 14 million people die each year of infectious diseases, many of which are preventable or treatable, such as acute respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria and tuberculosis. Up to 45% of deaths in Africa are thought to be due to infectious disease. In the third world, over half of the children under 5 die of disease. The vast majority are too poor to afford proper health care. Countless millions more suffer debilitating illness and 2 billion people lack access to basic health care. The availability of cheap drugs and better health care system would help to reduce these figures. (Policy of United Nations, Kofi Annan).

Michael

Are Doctors Happy?

 

Reprinted from Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA) Excerpted from "Dissatisfaction with Medical Practice" by Abigail Zuger, MD, New England Journal of Medicine, January 1, 2004:

"Survey results suggest that levels of professional satisfaction have dwindled substantially during the past few decades. In 1973, less than 15 percent of several thousand practicing physicians reported any doubts that they had made the correct career choice. In contrast, surveys administered within the past 10 years have shown that 30 percent to 40 percent of practicing physicians would not choose to enter the medical profession if they were deciding on a career again, and an even higher percentage would not encourage their children to pursue a medical career. In a telephone survey of 2,000 physicians that was conducted in 1995, 40 percent of the doctors said they would not recommend the profession of medicine to a qualified college student."

Among the potential reasons why:

  • Malpractice: "A 2003 survey showed that 62 percent of final-year residents who responded reported considerable concern with malpractice issues, and 24 percent said that, were they to start their education again, they would not choose a medical career."
  • Income: " Income does not always generate happiness, although in one study, physicians earning from $250,000 to $299,999 a year were 98 percent more likely to report being very content with their medical career than those earning half as much. However, a large study of primary care physicians showed that income level was irrelevant to levels of either satisfaction or stress."
  • Specialty: "In one small study, researchers compared the professional satisfaction that general internists, cardiologists, and ophthalmologists said they derived from outpatient work. The authors concluded that boredom and infrequent therapeutic success might underlie many physicians' dissatisfaction with primary care medicine."
  • Expectation: In response to an editorial on physicians' unhappiness that appeared in a 2001 issue of the British Medical Journal, a doctor from India wrote, "My father's patients regarded him as a God. Now the patients treat you as one and demand miracles. You know it all (or ought to), and you cannot let a patient die no matter what." The editorial elicited many similar comments from doctors all over the world. The comments shared a theme of unhappiness caused by profound disparities in expectations.

 

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