This.
And this.
Add on also that for residents, your own needs (time with family, sleep, food, going to the bathroom) are not prioritized (and in fact are actively discouraged); most have the financial stress of high loans coming due where you can't afford to quit medicine even if you want to (and that goes for attendings too); and dealing with the emotions of seeing the worst that human beings can do to each other as well as to themselves. I spent my last Christmas doing a 25 hour shift in the ICU taking care of two people who tried to hang themselves and one who shot half his face off (and survived). I'm guessing yours was a tad more pleasant, OP. At least I hope so.
No. Frequent fliers are people who show up to the ED constantly for chronic issues that can't be taken care of in the ED and that aren't emergencies. They're things like being drunk/disorderly, chronic pain (often seeking opiates), and other patients who tend to be among the more unpleasant to deal with because they're also manipulative and belligerent people with personality disorders, and there's nothing you can do to make them better.
People are remarkably uneducated about their health care issues. For example, it's incredibly frustrating when you ask someone what they take for their diabetes, and they're either like, "wait, I have diabetes?" or "I'm not taking any meds," or my absolute favorite, "it's the little round white pill." Oh, of course. Because there's only one little round white pill in existence on the planet, and since I'm sitting around memorizing what every name brand and generic pill for your health condition looks like (sarcastic), now I know exactly what you're taking, including the dose and schedule, all of which I need to document to make sure that you get the correct meds in the correct amounts at the correct times while you're in the hospital (which you're being admitted to because you weren't actually taking those little round white pills like you were supposed to).
There are. Everyone who gets admitted to the hospital gets a packet, and every patient who gets discharged gets oral and written discharge instructions. But there are several problems with them. First, we grossly overestimate our patients' health care literacy, and their literacy in general. A lot of patient care info is written at a high school reading level, while a lot of patients read at an elementary school reading level. Or they can't read at all, and they've learned how to effectively fake their way through. Or they don't understand English all that well, and we don't have patient materials printed in Swahili. Second, even when patients understand what they're supposed to do and are willing to do it, there are a lot of social factors that interfere, from lack of money (can't buy their meds) to lack of transportation (can't physically go to their follow up appointment) to lack of accessibility (can't get time off from work during business hours to get to the doctor). I don't have a good solution to any of those problems. If you do, have at it.
It's very well documented, from how med student and physician empathy decreases over time the more patient care experience they have, to kinds of patients that physicians dread (see Groves J: Taking care of the hateful patient. N Engl J Med 1978; 298: 883-887 for the classic article on that topic. For one of the earlier studies discussing erosion of empathy among trainees, see Hojat M, et al: The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School. Academic Medicine 2009; 84: 1182-119.)
A word of unsolicited advice: don't ever say another thing about reiki that suggests you're a proponent of it, unless you're discussing how it's a great example of the placebo effect. That's doubly true if you actually believe it works. Defending reiki (or homeopathy, my other favorite completely implausible alternative medicine modality) is a great way to ensure that you'll have zero credibility whatsoever with most Western-trained physicians, including the ones on adcoms who will be evaluating your med school apps. (On a semi-facetious note, I have plenty of anecdotal evidence for the existence of anti-reiki, where I can adjust the patient's energy fields by merely bringing my hands near them without actually touching them, and it causes them to have excruciating 10/10 pain that can only be relieved by IV dilaudid.)
