An Epidemic Of Disillusioned Doctors?

Danielle Ofri | Danielle Ofri | July 2, 2013

Last week I was ready to quit medicine. I was seeing a new patient with diabetes, heart disease, anemia, hypertension, osteopenia, hypothyroidism, reflux, depression and pain in every part of her body. From a bag she produced 18 pill bottles—from about as many doctors—and piled them onto my desk. She pulled out a form from her job that needed to be filled out, plus a prior-approval form that her insurance company required as well as a stack of photocopied records from the other doctors. She didn’t speak English, so we waded through her complicated medical history via a telephone interpreter. I don’t like to write while I am talking with a patient, but I couldn’t afford to fall behind in my documentation, so I typed madly into the fifty required fields of our electronic medical record while the patient recounted her complex medical history.

In the middle of this, the computer seized up, then turned a shade of gray that in an ICU would elicit the code team. I didn’t want to lose the interpreter on the phone, so I fiddled with the control-alt-delete buttons while I continued the interview, moving on to the refresh buttons, the escape buttons, finally squatting awkwardly under the desk to yank the on-off switch of the computer.