SERIES: MEDICINE AS A SYSTEM THAT HARMS
A urologist I've spoken with — details blurred to protect his privacy — was seeing patients at a pace that would be difficult to describe as sustainable by any reasonable measure. Three days a week in clinic, a six-month waitlist for follow-up care for men with prostate cancer. He knew what that wait meant. He knew what it felt like to tell a man he'd have to wait six months for a conversation about his diagnosis, his prognosis, his fear. He wanted to close that gap. So he pushed.
Each appointment in those already long days carried its own weight. These weren't routine check-ins. He was delivering cancer news. He was conducting intimate physical exams on men who were frightened and vulnerable. He was having conversations that deserved an hour, in the minutes the schedule allowed. And then the next patient. And the next. Not back-to-back appointments in the administrative sense — back-to-back moments that each demanded his full presence, his full skill, and something that doesn't appear on any productivity metric: his humanity.
He loved procedures. The other two days were procedures, all day, for years. Until his body gave out.
He is no longer practicing. A repetitive use injury — the kind that accumulates quietly and announces itself permanently — ended his career. The men with prostate cancer still wait. There is just one less dedicated, highly-skilled, highly-trained clinician available to see them.
I think about that story when I see headlines about physician burnout initiatives. Because what happened to him wasn't a wellness problem. It wasn't a resilience deficit. It was a system that demanded more from him than a human body could give, dressed up as dedication, until there was nothing left to take.
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The American College of Surgeons released something significant this month: the first national framework outlining measurable workplace standards for surgeons. Call schedule limits. Inpatient census thresholds. Fatigue mitigation policies. Protections for career longevity. It is a serious document, and I mean it when I say I'm glad it exists.
You can read the full press release here → https://www.facs.org/media-center/press-releases/2026/american-college-of-surgeons-releases-first-ever-workplace-standards-framework/
And then I read this line, buried in the recommendations: fatigue mitigation and wellness support should be recognized as patient safety measures rather than discretionary wellness benefits.
Read that again.
To get any of this taken seriously — to get the argument through the door at all — it had to be framed as something that protects patients. Not something that protects you. Not something that preserves the career you spent a decade or more building. Your wellbeing, your longevity, your ability to still be doing this work in twenty years — none of that was a sufficient reason on its own.
I don't say that to criticize the ACS. They are working within a culture that has never recognized physician suffering as a standalone problem worth solving. So they made the argument they could get traction with. It worked. The framework exists. That matters.
But you are a person, not a patient safety measure. And while the profession debates frameworks and administrators decide whether to adopt them — a process that will take years, if it happens at all — you are working inside a system that has not changed yet. You are absorbing the cost of that gap with your body, your sleep, your relationships, your sense of self.
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What I hear from physicians is not primarily complaints about scheduling or administrative burden, though those are real. What I hear is a quieter erosion. A growing distance from the reasons they chose this work. A competence that still functions while something underneath it has gone very still.
The system will eventually catch up, or it won't. Either way, that erosion is happening now, to real people, and it doesn't wait for policy implementation timelines.
The urologist I mentioned didn't stop practicing because he stopped caring. He stopped because the structure he was working inside had no mechanism to protect him from his own commitment to his patients. His care for them was the very thing the system used to extract more than he could sustain.
That is not a personal failing. That is a structural one. But the body that paid for it was his.
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I work with physicians in exactly this situation. What you're experiencing isn't weakness, and it isn't permanent. It is a predictable response to an inhuman set of conditions — and there is work that can help, without weekly appointments or a diagnosis.
What would it take to slow down before the system doesn't need you to be well — it needs you to be indestructible. What would it take to slow down before it extracts everything you came here to give?
Strategy sessions are complimentary and confidential. You can book one here → https://clearblueskytherapyconsulting.com/page/ei-general-book-a-strategy-session
Katherine Driskell is an EMDR therapist based in Minnesota, serving clients across the state and via intensive format. She specializes in work with physicians and other high-achieving professionals from her home base in Rochester, Minnesota.
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