“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The American medical system is ill, and physicians are among its sickest patients. As a dual-boarded physician, an assistant professor of family medicine, and someone who has walked the halls of both academia and clinical practice, I have witnessed firsthand the symptoms of this systemic disease. It is a sickness that manifests in exhaustion, disillusionment, and a steady erosion of the fundamental calling that brought so many of us to medicine in the first place.
In academic medicine, the love of teaching is often stifled under the weight of RVU generation and research quotas. Research itself has devolved into a game of professional advancement rather than genuine inquiry. Every other Tuesday, I find myself in a research seminar, sifting through a deluge of studies that say a great deal about very little. The goal is not necessarily to contribute meaningful knowledge but to publish, to pad CVs, and to survive in a system that rewards quantity over quality. The irony is that these efforts rarely improve patient care; instead, they fuel a cycle of intellectual exhaustion that leaves physicians disengaged and disheartened.
At these meetings, I see colleagues who are physically unwell—obesity, diabetes, hypertension, the very conditions we counsel our patients against, afflict our own ranks. The most academically productive among us often appear the sickest. The stress of relentless deadlines, clinical demands, and bureaucratic hoops to jump through takes its toll, and yet we normalize it. We mask our own symptoms with coffee, stimulants, and the false promise that “it gets better.”
The toll on personal lives is just as devastating. Relationships crumble under the weight of our grueling schedules. Many of my colleagues are members of online forums for single physicians, lamenting the near impossibility of forming meaningful connections. Residency, in particular, is a crucible that breaks more relationships than it strengthens. The time, emotional depletion, and constant exposure to suffering chip away at our ability to invest in personal bonds.
And going back even further to my first year of residency, after an 80-hour workweek left me barely functional, I was advised to take stimulants to stay awake. When I pushed back, suggesting that rest and addressing the root causes of my exhaustion might be a better approach, my program director’s response was chilling: “At least 80 percent of your classmates are on medications for anxiety and depression—why not you?” That moment crystallized a painful truth: Our system does not heal; it medicates symptoms and moves on. Asking whether this was good medicine was not well received, and I did not remain in that particular program for long.
This is not a sustainable model. We cannot continue to normalize physician suffering under the guise of resilience. Burnout, depression, and even physician suicide rates are alarmingly high, yet the system trudges on, indifferent to the cost. If the healers themselves are broken, how can they effectively care for others?
Medical education and practice need a radical shift. We must stop rewarding meaningless productivity and start valuing genuine intellectual curiosity and well-being. The culture of overwork, disguised as dedication, must be dismantled. We need to create a system that acknowledges physicians as human beings, not just providers of endless labor.
The current state of medicine demands that we ask ourselves hard questions: Are we truly healing, or are we just adapting to a sick system? The answer is clear, and it is time for change.
The author is an anonymous physician.