The total concentration, power tools, and high stakes of the OR provided an exciting escape from the world I was supposed to occupy and from which I was supposed to derive my deepest satisfaction as a woman.
Pharmacologic interventions might help physicians overcome cognitive deficits resulting from loss of sleep while on call or help them retain more details about the patients under their care.
Is our generation of physicians somehow “weaker” because we’d rather not spend our entire lives at the office? Physicians who trained and practiced under more grueling conditions wonder how we expect to be competent physicians if we don’t work at it?
The medical profession has the responsibility and obligation in effective self-regulation to ensure the competence of practicing physicians, identifying and taking action against problem physicians, and regulating conflicts of interest.
Whether a physician fancies herself a member of the Green Party or the Tea Party, he or she must obey our government’s rules in her advocacy for that cause and be extremely diligent in those increasingly rare instances when she feels herself compelled not to do so.