What if doctors were at the origin of the burnout epidemic?
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Hypothesis: burnout is a contagious disease and doctors are its origin. Burnout is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition. It is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. For patients, burnout has become a sort of catch-all including (normal) professional exhaustion and, overwork, fatigue including physical, depression and its multiple origins. This leads to an inversion of the place of the doctor and the patient: it is often the patient who declares “I am burned out”, the diagnosis is made by the patient. The doctor has become gradually a health provider facing a patient who has become a user. Burnout syndrome has become a global phenomenon that requires “systemic” thinking. The first descriptions of burnout in the early 1970s were made among healthcare providers. This ill-being may have a deeper origin, linked to the existing distortion between humanist modes of thought and materialist modes of thought. This begins at the start of the training of doctors with teaching and selection according to the pascalian “spirit of geometry”, whereas medical practice is more of a “spirit of finesse” strongly imbued with humanism. A solution may perhaps be found in “magnetic hospitals”: the variables constituting non-economic incentives are as powerful – if not more powerful – drivers of behavior than the variables affecting the “income” component.
Source: HAL
Language: English
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7206790544