It's Not Burnout, It's Moral Injury

EXACTLY. So many don't seem to get this. It IS moral injury. The doctor feels like SHIT when they know they aren't doing everything they can do for a patient. You know a kid could survive a disease but you don't tell them anything because they wouldn't qualify for the program since the kid did illegal drugs at some point and admitted it to you because he wanted to make sure his doctor knew all aspects of his health. People assume they have this "attorney-client-privilege" with their doctor about stuff like that but it doesn't extend to insurance and denial of things like organ transplants.

Meanwhile he actually DOES know some people who got around the new medicine/treatment's rigorous requirements but they were super rich and connected socially with important members of the hospital. The kid dies a few months later and the doctor is forced to compartmentalize this and pretend there was nothing he could do. Everything he could do, and he knows he could have done them would likely have been caught and put him in prison or lost his license but the kid would be alive.

Scenarios like this (though far less dramatic) happen every day. Especially with things like new treatments and drugs. Doctors have to deal with sick people who they know they could help so much more and tell them to take aspirin and sleep instead of let them into a PT program and performing a life-enhancing surgery.

My own dad is victim of this; He could have surgery to fix his arm after a lengthy rehab but his doctors are pushing him to do steroid injections and ibuprofen (which he has to cycle off because of liver damage) instead. He can't just "opt" for the surgery because insurance says, "steroids and drugs do most of the same thing" while neglecting the fact that one wouldn't need those things or their (very) negative side effects if they could get the arm fixed. Hundreds of thousands quoted to do this surgery so it clearly doesn't make economic sense when you can just take drugs and injections! Yeah.. My dad's having vacation in India next month, apparently it's going to cost him about $10,000 which I thought was a lot first but apparently it comes with a one-month stay. Funny thing is the same vacation in the US is apparently, "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

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