Chapter 8 - Solution #4: Follow the Advice You Would Give Patients

Summary

Many of the stress-management/burnout-reduction strategies outlined in previous chapters are well known to doctors and other healthcare providers. They are the strategies that trained medical professionals advise their patients to follow. But the data show conclusively that medical professionals are often not good at following their own advice. Indeed, many of the stress-management strategies that doctors and others say they implement in order to manage their stress are the opposite of the advice they routinely give others. Knowledge of the right things to do does not always result in behavior in line with that knowledge. Doctors are often not very good patients. Even while clearly knowing better, healthcare professionals engage in the same risky and harmful behaviors under stress as the general public that they serve. Especially during these most trying times of added stress for all, it is more critical than ever that healthcare providers do what they counsel their patients to do.