We’ve spent decades pretending we can heal everyone but ourselves. When doctors finally start to rest, set boundaries, and reclaim their humanity, something radical happens: we become better clinicians—and better people. Healing the healers isn’t selfish. It’s survival.
It happened, as these things often do, at 3 a.m. in a hospital call room that smelled faintly of instant noodles and despair. I was scrolling job boards under the blanket of duty hours I’d long stopped believing in, typing things like “remote work for doctors” and “how to resign quietly without guilt.”
For years, I’d told myself burnout was a sign of weakness—something that happened to people who couldn’t hack it. I’d survived on caffeine, guilt, and adrenaline. But that night, the façade cracked.
And that’s when I began to wonder: what if healing myself wasn’t selfish, but the most ethical thing I could do?
Medicine, for all its noble ideals, runs on a toxic myth: that good doctors don’t break. From the first day of medical school, we’re marinated in stoicism. We learn to smile while our bladders burst, to nod while our souls quietly erode.
There’s a sort of dark pride in it, isn’t there?
You hear a colleague say, “I was on call for 36 hours straight,” and instead of suggesting they see a neurologist, you congratulate them. It’s almost comical—if it weren’t killing us.
According to the 2025 Medscape Physician Burnout Report, over 60% of doctors in the US report symptoms of burnout. That’s not an epidemic; that’s a workforce on fire.
We call it resilience training, but often it’s just endurance training with better branding.
We tell ourselves it’s all for the patient. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: exhausted, irritable, half-present doctors don’t make good healers.
Research from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings shows that burned-out physicians are twice as likely to make medical errors. Compassion fatigue isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a safety issue.
I used to believe that collapsing at work meant I cared more. That missing every family dinner was the price of saving lives. But really, it was self-harm with a stethoscope.
We don’t talk enough about how self-sacrifice can quietly morph into self-abuse.
We love to quote “First, do no harm.” But it’s become a kind of cruel irony, hasn’t it? We’ll skip meals, lose sleep, ignore chest pain—and still call it noble.
We lecture medical students about self-care, then send them to cover another 24-hour shift. We hold “wellness weeks” sponsored by the same system that’s burning us out.
If that’s not hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.
Healing others while destroying ourselves isn’t sustainable. It’s moral injury dressed up as duty.
Then something shifts. Maybe it’s a breakdown, a divorce, a panic attack in the car park. For me, it was the quiet realization that I didn’t have to keep living like this.
A colleague—let’s call her Sarah—decided to take a sabbatical after a decade in critical care. She worried she’d lose her edge. Instead, she found her empathy. When she returned, her team noticed: she listened more, snapped less, laughed occasionally.
Rest hadn’t dulled her. It had restored her humanity.
We talk about rest like it’s indulgent. But it’s not. It’s radical. It’s resistance against a system that profits from our exhaustion.
A 2023 JAMA Network Open study found that reducing physician workloads improved not just mental health but patient outcomes. Less time charting, more time healing. Imagine that.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Even when we know we need rest, guilt kicks in like a conditioned reflex.
“If I take a day off, patients will suffer.”
“If I say no, I’m letting the team down.”
“If I rest, I’m weak.”
We’ve internalized a narrative where our worth depends on depletion. The more we give, the better we are. It’s martyrdom by spreadsheet.
When I finally took a proper break, I half-expected a tribunal to appear and revoke my license. Instead, I slept for three days, felt vaguely human again, and realized: the hospital didn’t collapse.
Maybe we’re not as indispensable as we think—and maybe that’s liberating.
As I sometimes tell colleagues: “I used to think burnout could be fixed with a mindfulness app. Now I know it takes boundaries, therapy, and the occasional nap.”
Healing ourselves isn’t about bubble baths or yoga retreats (though, full disclosure, I’ve done both). It’s about boundaries, self-compassion, and reclaiming the parts of us that medicine forgot.
It’s learning to say, “No, I can’t take that extra shift.”
It’s asking for help before the panic attacks start.
It’s remembering that our humanity is the medicine.
Communities like Physicians Anonymous are built around this truth: that doctors heal better when they heal together. In our meetings, there’s no hierarchy, no judgment—just the relief of being seen.
Healing starts when we stop confusing martyrdom with meaning.
There’s a beautiful paradox here: the more doctors take care of themselves, the better care they give.
A 2022 Annals of Family Medicine study showed that physician well-being directly improves patient satisfaction and safety. Patients can sense when their doctor is present, calm, and compassionate.
We like to believe we can fake wellness. We can’t. Patients notice. They always do.
When we breathe easier, so do they.
I don’t know if Hippocrates ever imagined his oath would need a 21st-century update, but here’s mine:
I will heal myself as I heal others, because both are sacred work.
That 3 a.m. doctor in the call room? He still exists somewhere inside me. But now, when the exhaustion creeps in, I listen to him. I let him rest.
Healing the healers isn’t a luxury—it’s an act of defiance. A reclamation of the soul of medicine.
If you’re ready to start, you don’t have to do it alone. We’re here, quietly rewriting the story—one rested doctor at a time.
A recovering physician who left medicine after burning out and more. Overachiever. Impostor syndrome. Addict. Had never heard of Corrigan's Secret Door* until it was too late. Co-founded Physicians Anonymous with intention to solve physician burnout, mental illness, and addiction. Hopes to prevent future medical career disasters through peer support, advocacy, policy change, and innovation. * https://physiciansanonymous.org/corrigans-secret-door-and-other-stories/
