Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Part-Time Medicine & Career Change”
You don’t have to become a refugee from medicine. Welcome to the first installment in what I hope will become a shared playbook for physicians who seek role models: docs who cut back to improve work-life balance. Mime in a shrinking box, anyone? When burnout strikes, the reflex is to desperately search for an escape hatch from medicine as quickly …
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett describes himself as a repurposed physician, which is one of the more delightful descriptions of a retiree’s encore career I’ve heard to date. I had the pleasure of meeting Cory (forgive my Californian’s desire to remain on informal terms) at FinCon18, and he was far more than I expected: former rock star Stanford student (as a …
I’m starting a series on Docs Who Cut Back, and I’d love to share your story if you have the time and inclination. The therapeutic window of a drug tends to describe the range of doses in which it has the desired clinical effect. Too little and you lose the benefit you sought. Too much and you might die. Medicine …
Old school medicine was not conducive to balance. Your family got the scraps of time leftover after your patients had staked their claim. Cutting back on your clinical load was done reluctantly, of necessity. You cut back because you needed your aortic valve replaced, and your energy in clinic never fully returned; because the diagnosis of Parkinson’s meant you could …
For physicians with specialties than enable them to scale back time commitments, I’ve always suspected that creating a “glide path to retirement” could make a significant difference in day to day quality of life. Time to test that hypothesis! It’s been six weeks at my reduced shift load as an emergency physician, and I thought it would be a worthwhile …
Once upon a time, a strapping young buck dove into the field of Emergency Medicine with ne’er a thought of night shift fatigue. He loved his work, headed into each shift bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and relished the butterflies in his stomach that multiplied commensurate with the number of ambulance rigs in the emergency lot. He loved the social justice aspect …
The aptly named SEAK, Inc. (Skills, Education, Achievement, Knowledge) is a continuing education company that sends me annual brochures touting how physicians like me can make money outside of the clinical practice of medicine as we know it. They are the ultimate purveyors of exit strategy, the mantra hidden between the lines of their pamphlet whispering, “Someday you will …
I had just turned 40, and was leading a busy life that might resonate with your own: a full-time job in community practice, marriage and fatherhood. Since I didn’t want to take time away from my wife or kids, self-replenishing (i.e., pleasure out of proportion) pursuits suffered. A writing group I’d started in internship began to founder because the handful …