Jordan Abbott MD

Physicians are not burned out because medicine is hard. Medicine has always been hard. That is not new. We are burned out because the things making it harder have nothing to do with medicine. Fix the system. Keep the physicians.

The responses expose confusion between corporate medicine, pharma, and your doctor. Most physicians sacrificed 10+ years of their life with a desire to help people. We’re as frustrated with the system as you are. We’re fighting it too. We aren’t the enemy, just an easy target.

@molsjames You are right and I think about this a lot. Physicians got busy, burned out, and buried in documentation. The gap is real. The problem is who filled it and what they are selling into that space.

@JordanAbbottMD Influencers developed because doctors left a gap. Our healthcare system needs to radically change and this is part of it

The influencer telling you to distrust your doctor has no liability if they are wrong. Your physician does. That asymmetry matters. It should factor into who you listen to.

@SeedOilDsrspctr @HeartOTXHeartMD Exactly. It’s a lose-lose for physicians. If you allow the visit to go on as long as a patient would like, you may have one happy patient and the subsequent 10 are frustrated

As a doctor I very rarely say “ok we are done talking now, you can’t tell me anything more, sorry we ran out of time.”

The problem isn't the availability of scientific research. It's the flood of people misinterpreting complex data with zero training and full confidence. Access to information is no longer the barrier. Understanding it is.

Physicians are not resistant to change. We are resistant to being changed by people who have never taken care of a patient.

@TherealDoctorJ I’m so sorry for your loss. Talking about it takes courage and brings awareness. Thank you.

Today marks four years since we lost my brother - a physician, away on a locums assignment. It was around 9:15 AM PST on May 21, 2022 when we last spoke. I was on my way to the gym, it felt like just another Saturday. That conversation lives with me every day. What I wouldn't give for just one more. His passing changed how I see everything. I found myself paying closer attention to what other physicians were carrying, the quiet struggles. For a while, I felt hopeful. There was real momentum building around physician wellness, and it felt like something was finally shifting. But the needle is moving in the wrong direction. Burnout rates remain at historic highs. Physicians are leaving clinical medicine faster than we can replace them. The administrative burden - prior authorizations, documentation, clunky EMRs, breaking the glass on a patient there to see YOU, continues to consume the hours that should be spent on patients, or on rest, or on simply being human. Mental health stigma in medicine hasn't gone away; if anything, the fear of career consequences keeps too many physicians suffering in silence. And we lost more colleagues to suicide this year than we should ever accept as normal. I don't have all the answers. But I know this - we have to figure it out, and we are running out of time before the profession is just a shell of itself.

@ssdhall I’ve spent the past 4 years exclusively caring for oncology patients at a cancer center. Dermatologists carry loss too. The specialty does not matter, though. All of us deliver difficult news and lose patients. Physicians need to start assuming the best of one another.

What’s going on in the dermatology clinic ?

Physicians built the most trusted profession in the world. Then we got quiet. We got busy. We got burned out. And while we were head down, other people started telling our story for us. Let's take the narrative back. Nobody tells your story better than you.

@DrRJWebb You look after dying children and have never been given the tools to process what that costs you. That's not acceptable. It should be part of training from day one. Thank you for what you do.

This has blown my mind this evening… it’s so true. I look after dying children, I’ve never been taught how to grieve. Is it needed? Is a conversation about this needed? Should it be part of training?

Most physicians were not taught how to grieve a patient. You just do it quietly, between appointments, and then walk into the next room. That is not resilience. That is suppression. And we have normalized it completely.

“Doctor-like” worker is exactly as bad as it sounds. Would you tolerate a “pilot-like” worker flying your plane? We will all get to witness how this turns out.

Medicine keeps asking physicians to give more. More documentation. More metrics. More productivity. More patience with a system that has none for us. At some point we have to ask what is left when physicians have nothing left to give.

@thewcd4 Telling a 36 year old mother of three that the lesion we biopsied was a melanoma met and she is now stage IV. A leukemia cutis diagnosis in an 27 year old with no medical history. Telling a parent their infant has Langerhans cell histiocytosis.

@JordanAbbottMD What dermatology decisions are you making at 3am?

Medicine is a language only physicians fully speak. The weight of a difficult diagnosis. The 3am second guessing. The smile you put on before walking into the next room. Find the people who speak it. You need them more than you think.

@shortney0006 And that right there is exactly the problem we’re up against.

@JordanAbbottMD I actually told a patient once that I am a human too and I also have feelings and they looked me dead in the face and said “no, you’re not.”

Physicians are trained to push through everything. Pain, exhaustion, doubt, grief. All of it. Just push through. That training saves patients. It also kills doctors. We have to start letting each other be human.

@zimsmom When I call with biopsy results on the weekend, many patients ask, “isn’t the clinic closed right now?” Yes, that’s the reason I have time to call.

@JordanAbbottMD When I had Covid I emailed through the portal to let my PCP know. He called me at 7pm that same night. I was so thankful but upset at the same time. I told him that he needed his down time why are you calling me.

@Mike_Crabile I’m sorry you went through that. Thanks for sharing.

@JordanAbbottMD My dad died unexpectedly during residency and I had to come back after 2 weeks because they wouldn't let me go off cycle. I wasn't ready to come back and started drinking heavily. They all knew and pretended they didn't. Finally got myself right after I finished.

A portion of many visits now goes toward un-teaching something the internet got wrong. That time comes from somewhere. Misinformation doesn't just spread bad information. It quietly erodes the time physicians have to actually practice medicine.