Surgeon here, in private practice. Agree with the article - all the stressors he mentions are typical of both residents and staff physicians. The hour crunch for me is better post residency but overall the stress is unchanged. Probably higher after training with the added responsibilities & risks.
My sense is that the field developed in the era of independent/private practice, where the grueling hours worked was justified by high pay and minimal bureaucratic/administrative burden. Add decades of stagnant/falling pay plus death by a thousand administrative cuts and the profession no longer justifies the difficult working conditions as convincingly. Some practices are still good, others terrible. Look at the rate of physician turnover to see which is which.
Oh and the “provider” discussion is worth paying attention to. Your doctor has this calculus worked out - years & energy invested, work environment & income expected, then the only viable option in your city is to be employed by a large hospital system (because hospitals get paid at least double for the same work, outcome is as expected.) But wait there’s more: you are now called “provider” by your large hospital employer who hires 2x NP employees to do the “same” work as you and pay half. Guess what direction the pricing pressure is going. In the future expect few MDs to stay in primary care because the system does not support that path. Specialty training is the future for MDs who invest time, energy, & money to excel in their field.
Is there something unique to your application beyond the parameters I’d expect are typical for mech keyboard use? Buy one, use daily, and expect to work indefinitely?
We live in America. We have an old house (>100 yrs). One bathroom had a tub. We renovated the bathroom to incorporate a shower head. Turns out we couldn't purchase a new tub that fit the old dimensions, as new tubs are smaller, reportedly to meet new efficiency standards. So we had to frame in a smaller recess to fit the new, smaller tub. Wah wah, I guess the answer is, old tubs used to be more adult sized, and new ones aren't because of efficiency / climate change trends? As others have pointed out, you can still get big tubs but they're more like jacuzzi or whirlpool types that take up more space.
Curious paragraph at the very end of the NYT’s article on this:
“ On average, it takes 28 flights per week to cover a 1,750-square-mile region, according to the state Food and Agriculture Department. To combat the Leimert Park outbreak, officials said they would divert two flights per week to target the affected neighborhoods.
Strict procedures are now in place to prevent another accidental release of fertile flies, Dr. Leathers said. “We really need to make sure there’s a lot more sterile flies out there, than the wild flies,” he said, “to make it more likely to work.””
Thats the end of the article. No mention of accidental release of fertile flies elsewhere in the article. Article burying the lede?
Odd question but are you reading Algorithms to Live By? This quote & a related anecdote features in the book. Or maybe this is just a really famous Knuth quote.
Antipersonnel mines absolutely should have an expiry date after which they are no longer triggered by the depression of their sensor. Issue is, these things are mass manufactured and probably have some defect rate which increases with time after deployment. So they couldn’t be trusted to be ‘safe’ after expiring anyway. But still would save lives & limbs to have a mechanism like that built in.
I appreciate your effort in this post. I am a practicing physician and also a person who majored in biochemistry, rather than the more pre-med focused biology/chemistry major offered at my institution. My opinion is that organic chemistry is a great window into the complexity of biologic chemistry that happens to be the foundation of medicine.
Is it necessary for all physicians to peer through this window in order to practice quality medicine? Perhaps not. But does it give us an appreciation, and humility for, the astounding complexity of biologic systems that underpin all clinical interventions? Ideally so. At some point during pre medical training there should be - to be blunt - a filter that separates adaptable and bright students from those who hazily wish to pursue medicine but do not have the capacity to do so at a high level.
There are many career paths for those who can not adapt and learn at the high level which has been traditionally been required to complete medical school. We can, as a society, either lower the standards or maintain that high level of requirement that has been the badge of "MD." My bias of course, having completed 13 years of education after high school, is to recommend that we do not lower the standards of the MD process. The system, as it has evolved to date, has plenty of opportunity for those who desire less rigorous training, for example nurse practitioner and physician assistant tracks. There is still a place in this world for highly trained and motivated individuals who wish to be the best in their field. Signed, a professional who benefited from the strong institutions that create medical doctorates.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/the-us-weather-model... (2016) {hard to believe this one is 10 years old}
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-... (2025)