Newswise — Medical blogger Gus Geraci MD is consulting clinical adviser at the Pennsylvania Medical Society (PAMED). Prior to joining PAMED, Dr. Geraci worked for multiple different health care entities, including health systems, insurers, and health care vendors. In this Quality and Value blog, he writes about three components to burnout and several ways physicians can approach those components to find balance and increase happiness.

We entered into medicine mostly because we wanted to help people with yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, skills, and experience. We survived the rigors of pre-med, competing against the best and brightest to pass the first hurdle, getting into medical school.

We then absorbed the knowledge of thousands of pages of books, and the experience and skills of our older more experienced future colleagues, enduring incredibly long hours and tremendous amounts of work through medical school, then residency in our chosen future profession within the house of medicine.

None of us thought the work would ever go away, but we hoped that as time, maturity, and position increased, the tremendous burden of training would be converted to a lesser burden to using that training for good. The goal was to finally use the hard won training, skills, and always growing experience to help.

Many of us are there, practicing, having finally achieved the goal of being able to use the skills for good. Then why are so many of us burned out, or close to it.…

To read the entire blog, visit https://www.pamedsoc.org/tools-you-can-use/topics/quality-and-value-blog/BlogMay1116

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