Resilience Against Burnout | Gail Gazelle, MD

The Doctor's Art

According to our guest on this episode, Gail Gazelle, MD, there has never been a more difficult time to be a doctor. Whether or not you agree with this statement, it's true that clinicians today are expected to see more patients in less time than ever before, spend hours on the electronic medical record, and manage countless administrative and organizational pressures. Dr. Gazelle is a physician coach who specializes in helping doctors build resilience and confidence in order to overcome burnout and rediscover joy in medicine. She is the author of the book Mindful MD: Six Ways Mindfulness Restores Your Autonomy and Cures Healthcare Burnout. Over the course of our conversation, we discussed the psychological and organizational factors that contribute to burnout and what we can do to overcome them.

In this episode, you will hear about:

• What drew Dr. Gazelle into medicine and what eventually led her away from clinical practice - 1:58
• The differences and similarities between coaching and therapy - 7:22
• How much of coaching is about helping people change the narratives of their lives - 9:45
• The kinds of people who seek Dr. Gazelle’s help - 14:18
• The increasing acceptance of coaching in the healthcare profession - 15:51
• The extent to which an individual clinician can address burnout - 24:49
• Reflections on how perfectionism creates overstressed physicians and how to change that - 34:04
• A discussion of Dr. Gizelle’s book Mindful MD and the six ways mindfulness can help physicians - 40:25

In this episode, we discussed the Atul Gawande's 2011 Harvard Medical School commencement address, titled Cowboys and Pit Crews, later published in the New Yorker. We also discuss the article Does Medicine Overemphasize IQ? by Ezekiel J. Emanuel & Emily Gudbranson, originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Gail Gazelle is the author of the book Mindful MD: Six Ways Mindfulness Restores your Autonomy and Cures Healthcare Burnout; you can download a free chapter at GailGazelle.com. She also authored the article The Slow Code: Should Anyone Rush to Its Defense? published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which we discussed in this episode.

You can follow Dr. Gazelle on Twitter @GailGazelleMD.

Visit our website www.TheDoctorsArt.com where you can find transcripts of all episodes.

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