Dr. Pamela Wible spends the afternoon with Tamara and Marlo on 7th & Washington in Eugene, Oregon. A photoessay by Pamela Wible, M.D.
Pamela Wible, M.D., pioneered the first idea clinic designed entirely by patients. Are you a nurse, doctor, med student who wants a community-supported ideal clinic? Join the next Teleseminar & Retreat and be part of the Ideal Medical Care Movement! Photos by Spark Boemi.
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I’ve been a doctor for twenty years. I’ve not lost a single patient to suicide. I’ve lost only colleagues, friends, lovers–ALL male physicians–to suicide. Why?
Here’s what I know:
A physician’s greatest joy is the patient relationship.
Assembly-line medicine undermines the patient-physician relationship.
Most doctors are burned out, overworked, or exhausted.
Many doctors spend little time with their families.
Workaholics are admired in medicine.
Medicine values competition over nurturing.
Many doctors function in survival mode.
Doctors are not supposed to make mistakes.
Caring for sick people can make you sick if you don’t care for yourself.
Medical education often dissociates mind from body and spirit.
Some medical students believe they graduate with PTSD.
Seeing too much pain and not enough joy is unhealthy.
For a physician, a cry for help is weakness.
The reductionist medical model is dehumanizing for patient and physician.
Many doctors are emotionally detached (especially male physicians).
Doctors are obsessive-compulsive perfectionists in an imperfect medical system.
Physicians are the nation’s social safety net with few resources to help patients.
Some doctors feel like indentured slaves.
Death is perceived as failure.
Doctors don’t take very good care of themselves or each other.
Many doctors are in denial about the high rate of physician suicide.
Physicians are often bullied by insurance companies, employers, and patients.
Doctoring is more than a job; it’s a calling, an identity.
Doctors are often socially isolated.
Doctors can’t just be people. They’re doctors 24/7.
Doctors can feel severe psychological pain.
Doctors can feel powerless.
Doctors can feel trapped. Some see no alternatives to their suffering.
Doctors have easy access to lethal drugs and firearms.
Doctors have the same problems as everyone else.
Doctors have marital distress. They get divorced.
Doctors have addiction to drugs and alcohol.
Doctors have economic hardship and unbearable debt.
Doctors have mental illness.
Doctors are human.
Watch TED talk on physician suicide.
Pamela Wible, M.D., is a family physician, author, and expert in physician suicide prevention. She offers biannual retreats for physicians struggling with burnout and depression. Contact her at idealmedicalcare.org.
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How does a Jewish doctor prepare for the holidays? By decorating her house with festive medical specimens, of course! All have been retrieved from human bodies, many during autopsies. I’m a hoarder with a medical art fetish. It started with my turquoise and heart valve necklace. Now my IUD Christmas tree. What should I make next?
Photo credit: Spark Boemi
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On birthdays and holidays, many girls get chocolates or flowers from their fathers, but my dad is a little different.
One day I receive a package of Godiva gallstones. Wow! I imagine glistening gallbladder sacs sliced open, oozing with coconut cream, cherry chunks, or nutty nougat, and then I lift the cover off the gorgeous gold box to discover seventeen clear containers with tight-fitting lids. Arranged artfully inside—like specialty chocolates—each tiny jar a surprise: from purple-pigmented pebbles to tan tapioca pearls, tricolor treasures to jaundice-yellow gems. One has a solitary three-centimeter rock. Ouch!
An inflamed gallbladder is painful. But who gets gallstones? In medical school, they taught us a simple way to identify the typical patient. Just remember the four Fs: Fat, Fertile, Females, in their Forties. Now I’m excited every time I see heavy middle-aged women walk into the clinic.
I smile as a big lady named Belinda walks in. She says, “I got shooting pains in my belly going to my right shoulder blade, Doc.”
On her exam I note pain in the right upper quadrant of her abdomen. I try to hide my excitement. “I bet you have gallstones. Let’s get an ultrasound to confirm the diagnosis.”
“Really? Gallstones?” she asks.
“Wait, wait, wait. I have to show you something.” I open my gold box. “Look Belinda! Aren’t they beautiful?”
“I got gemstones in my belly?”
“Yep!”
(Excerpt from: Pet Goats & Pap Smears)
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I often wonder: why am I a doctor?
The truth is, I want to live in the real world, a world without pretense, a world where people can’t hide behind money or status.
Illness uncovers our authenticity. Doctoring satiates my need to be witnessed and to witness the raw, uncensored human experience. I crave intensity.
Like an emotional bungee jumper, I live to inhale the last words of a dying man, to hear the first cry of a newborn baby, to feel the slippery soft skin in my hands, to cut the cord and watch a drop of blood fall on my shoe, to wipe a new mother’s tears, to introduce a father to his son, to hold a daughter’s hand as she kisses her father good-bye one last time.
I am a doctor because I refuse to be numb. I want to live on the precipice of the underworld, the afterworld, to look into patients’ eyes, to free-fall into an abyss of love, despair, death and then wake up tomorrow and do it all again.
Maybe doctoring fills a hole, a void. I doctor for connection, to be needed—to be loved.
(Excerpt from Pet Goats & Pap Smears)
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Doctor revived after suicide. Here's what he says.
