You have worked very hard to get where you are.
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” ~ Steve Jobs
We will all leave clinical medicine at some point. Some of us will leave on our own accord. Some of us will be forced to leave due to injury or death. Some of us will lose our license or will be forced out of a job due to down-sizing or a contract falling through. Perhaps starting over with another physician group just is not an option.
Some physicians, however, will choose to leave clinical medicine.
We all have hard days as physicians. Some days we all have a fleeting thought of not only leaving our job, but leaving medicine altogether. This might be towards the beginning of your career or it might be at the end. But when is it time to hang up the stethoscope?
Before you decide to leave medicine, you should ask yourself several questions.
Are you going through a slump?
Everyone goes through a slump in their practice. It is like “The Wall” during your residency training (Chapter 7). I think that after all the buildup and excitement, physicians get out into practice, pass their boards, and say “Is this all there is?”
It is the physician equivalent to a midlife crisis, but it happens with more vigor because the price you paid to become a physician was so high.
Are you dealing with Burnout?
Take an online questionnaire, take a personal inventory and find out if you are burnt out. Perhaps you can do some interventions like building some resiliency, seeing a therapist and work your way through the burnout. Not all burn out requires you to completely leave medicine. Maybe you need to change your job, or reduce your hours, or find ways to improve your working environment (Chapter 7).
Do you like medicine, but not your specialty?
Perhaps you chose the wrong specialty. Did you have your specialty narrowed down to two choices and now you wonder if you took the wrong path? Perhaps you should be looking into another specialty instead of looking to leave medicine (Chapter 34).
What if your problem is really your current job and not your specialty?
Perhaps you need to change jobs. Your dissatisfaction might be from the type of physician group you are working in. Explore your current job and consider changing jobs, before leaving medicine.
What if it is your Career?
Before embarking on a career change, take some time to seek out a trusted colleague or career coach to help you look through your job situation. If the issues are not unique to your place of employment, your boss, and it doesn’t look like it is going to get better, then you better look for an exit plan.
You may need to get further training like adding another degree development timeline for yourself.
Resistance to Leaving Medicine
You might know that the correct thing for you to do is to leave medicine. It is one thing to think about it, and another thing to actually “pull the ripcord” and leave medicine. Only you can decide if these issues are insurmountable obstacles to your exit from medicine.
There are some things that hold physicians back from leaving:
Sunk Cost – You spent a lot of time, money, and energy into becoming a physician.
Sunk costs are those things that have been put into investment and you cannot get back. You will have to accept the loss and move on.
Social Cost – If you were good, why are you leaving? This is one of the major things keeping people from leaving medicine. It is a sort of peer and society pressure to keep working as a physician. People assume that physicians only leave medicine because they cannot “cut it”. Why else would you leave?
You may have to shed your identity to survive.
Financial Cost – You may be worried that you will not be able to earn as much money in a different profession. You may have student loans and a lifestyle that depends upon a physician salary to maintain. You need to plan out your finances, if you are planning on leaving medicine (Chapters 11 & 12). There are other good paying jobs for physicians that will have less stress and be a good fit for you. You have to just find them.
Personal Cost – You like having the identity of being a physician and you are proud of the title of physician. How will your family react? Your family might be concerned about their lifestyle as well. You might be concerned that the promises you made to your family will not be upheld if you leave.
What if you have to leave medicine?
Remember when we talked about there being more to life than just medicine in Chapter 36? Losing a medical license is an emotionally and financially impacting event, but it is not the end. Your training goes beyond just your ability to practice medicine under a medical license.
There are jobs for physicians who have lost their medical license. You have skills sets which extend beyond your ability to practice medicine. Not all physicians need to work clinically to contribute to the field of medicine.
What should you do if you think you should leave medicine?
You will need someone to help you make this decision that is not directly impacted by your decision like your family or your partners in your group. It would be worth your time to hire a career coach for you work through these issues.
A career coach who works with physicians will be able to help you walk through the different options that you have.
What do you do when you realize that you should leave medicine?
You should have a plan in place before you leave medicine as to what you will do. This might mean doing a job search or finding out what types of jobs you can do.
We have built a section of resources for you on our website to help you through this transition. There are some great books on the subject that you can find in the links below.
Book Resources: