Got tired of reading the "news" and thinking about Covid, so back to AC userboard!
Nuggets of sanity here where there is mostly just gravel everywhere else.
I see pretty much the older crowd of doctors here on the Board -- is that because younger ones are all employed and on Cerner or EPIC? I'm thinking they miss a lot of professional camaraderie by being stuck in their silos, and that must contribute significantly to "burnout'. I miss the old days of a mixed hospital and office practice with occasional home visits thrown in -- peer contact in the morning in the surgical locker room, lunch at the hospital in the medical staff dining room, easy curbside consults and chat with other physicians all day long. We used to have the back office numbers of all the specialists we normally referred to, and a human being would answer the phone, and usually we could speak directly to the specialist about a problem in real time. All gone now.
I'm 77 -- I was making noise about retiring because while I can't claim to be "burnt out" -- I am so fed up with prior auths and second guessing by pharmacists and insurance companies with their ridiculous practice guidelines and distortions of "Beers List" -- I am ready to give in and recognize that medicine is now a corporate enterprise, run by hedge funders and bean counters, and there is no room for real doctors any more. And besides, they are going to be replaced by AI anyway. But my wife and medical partner who is 10 years younger says she isn't ready to give up.
But I didn't have to decide to retire -- COVID-19 came along, and we are now seeing about 6 patients a day. We try to do some telephone and video visits, but our demographics are wrong -- the patients don't have modern electronics for the most part, and they can't hear well enough to talk on the telephone. We cut back staff, stopped paying the clinicians and are running a hobby practice which for now, suits just fine.
