Does the Medical Profession Glorify Misery?

[With Dave taking a vacation, here is your opportunity to enjoy this rerun. We’ll be back with a new episode next week!]

Do everything you can to avoid the misery trap

On this episode we welcome guest Dr. Joshua Trebach, an emergency medicine physician here at Iowa. This past spring he posted on X that medicine must “lose the mentality of thinking its okay to be miserable for years (or decades) to justify it being ‘finally worth it’ in the end.”

We couldn’t agree more–live now, not later! Which is why PA2 Julie Vuong, M2 Fallon Jung, and MD/PhD student Madi Wahlen are each finding ways to reject that mentality. Indeed, medical education is changing, perhaps slowly, to reinforce the idea that just because medicine can be a difficult life doesn’t mean that you should obsessively look forward to the day it gets better. That day is a long way away, so do what you can (what you must) to be who you want to be even as you’re drinking from the firehose.

Also, we answer one of listener Mohamed’s questions on how he can jump right into his first year this fall with his eyes on patient advocacy.

my two cents: lose the mentality of thinking its okay to be miserable for years (or decades) to justify it being "finally worth it" in the end

i know too many people that graduated from med school only to be like "wait…this sucks"

find ways to have fulfillment each day https://t.co/9OPZ2VsLyd

— Josh Trebach, MD (@jtrebach) February 10, 2024

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