The term “burned out,” meaning “exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration,” did not exist several decades ago. However, it is apt. Some people, and no one knows how many, cannot stand the pressure of home and work life, so they live crippled lives or withdraw completely. Doctors are often near the top of the professions that cause burnout. Some specialties are more likely to produce this particular form of suffering than others.
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Many doctors are under pressure no matter how well their lives are going. Surgeons and obstetricians probably fall into this category. There are major consequences to their job performance. However, based on a new study, the doctors most likely to burn out are those who work in emergency rooms. (What a hospital looked like 100 years ago.)
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Emergency room doctors should be near the top of the burnout risk by specialty. This was made worse by the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency rooms were filled to overflowing with extremely sick patients, many of whom died. Before vaccines were available, there was often little they could do.
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According to the new “Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2023: ‘I Cry and No One Cares’,” the burnout rate among emergency room physicians is 65%. The study was conducted between June and October last year and covered 9,100 doctors.
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Next on the list of burned-out specialists were internal medicine at 60%, pediatrics at 59%, obstetrics and gynecology at 58%, and infectious diseases also at 58%.
The Most Burned-Out Doctors in America
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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