Physicians: Lower-than-average life expectancies

[paroquet]

According to researchers in Germany, physicians have lower-than-average life expectancies, and low quality of life. They attribute this to the enormous workload and stress levels.

http://www.med.uni-giessen.de/psychosomatik/projects.htm

It's supremely ironic that physicians themselves have very unhealthy (stress + lack of sleep + bad diets, usually) lives.

Can anyone confirm or refute this for me? I'm on the verge of deciding to go into medicine, but I came across that researcher's studies.

Shoot, I recently left another field that offered low quality of life and high stress, and now I discover that medicine is not much different...

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[dr_almondjoy_do]

Women Doctors at Heightened Risk for Suicide
December 23, 2004 10:23:49 AM PST , Reuters

Physicians -- especially female physicians -- face a higher suicide risk than the general population, according to a new report.
"The motivation to conduct this particular research came from a series of suicides of clinician colleagues at my hospital as well as a more recent suicide here at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites)," Dr. Eva S. Schernhammer from Channing Laboratory in Boston told Reuters Health.

Schernhammer and Dr. Graham A. Colditz analyzed the findings from 25 independent studies of physician suicide rates.

Suicide rates were 41 percent higher among male doctors than in the general population, the team reports in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The suicide rate for female doctors was more than double that in the general population.

While it has been known that doctors commit suicide somewhat more often usual, these results "suggest that the actual suicide rate ratio of female physicians is substantially higher than that of male physicians," the investigators conclude.
"Even only modestly elevated suicide rates among physicians will hopefully remind them that their profession poses an extraordinary amount of stress on them and encourage them to seek help with coping, if needed," Schernhammer said.

SOURCE: American Journal of Psychiatry, December 2004.

 

[paroquet]

Is there a watchdog organization for quality of life issues for health professionals?

Software engineering is also a field rife with unsatisfied employees who work 100 hour weeks in front of computer monitors, but with low pay:

http://www.igda.org/qol/whitepaper.php

Very recently, programmers (I used to be one) have begun fighting for their basic human rights:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/

 

[paroquet]

Does anyone here strongly identify with the problems discussed below?

From the EA Spouse blog:

"If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?

Right?"