There are several dimensions to burnout & dissatisfaction in clinical folks and ‘job boredom‘ is one of them – be it nurses, med students, residents or experienced doctors. Majority of clinical cases you will see in training & practice will be the ‘plain vanilla’ or ‘bread and butter’ cases such as COPD / CHF-exacerbation, cellulitis, gallstones, hip fractures, etc. And at one point even a Septic shock in ICU will feel like a daily repeat, kinda like being in the movie “Groundhog Day“. Experience is good, but also slowly erases the marvel of novelty.
Quoting an excerpt from A cute little book I read called “Follow Your Heart“:
Every event has the potential to transform us. Act as if every event has a purpose, and your life will have a purpose
– From “Follow your Heart” – by Andrew Matthews
And hijacking that in the context of patients: Every patient has the potential to educate & transform you. Act as if every patient has something to teach you even if it is a plain, boring case.
Mindfully endeavoring to find interesting medically related trivia to learn from each patient before mentally letting them go has become a fun little game for me. For example – I often use Wikipedia, Google-news or even Youtube to see what related trivia a search might bring up. For example, a search on ‘Tramadol’ on a ‘boring’ patient’s med list brought up how it was erroneously thought to be a trans-enantiomer hence misnamed Tramadol and also another dark reality of Tramadol . We have covered some drug-name origins on a quiz before. Maybe your boring patient has an interesting family history or a past medical that you don’t know enough about. Physical presence of a patient is a powerful memory maker when we read something in context…get creative & see 😎
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