Physicians have gone from being heroes to villains [PODCAST]

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

“I am exhausted and sad and disappointed and discouraged.

I am losing faith in humanity. Where is the ‘love your neighbor as yourself’? Where is the willingness to help each other? Where is the solidarity of those first days? Physicians have gone from being heroes to being villains. We have dedicated decades of our lives to learning how to care for you, but now our knowledge and expertise are being thrown back in our faces as not good enough and not as believable as your cousin’s friend who saw something on social media.

It is hard to keep going. But we do. We keep going because we have dedicated our lives and careers to our patients. We follow our Hippocratic Oath, and we do the best we can for every patient no matter who they are, what they believe, or what choices they make. But many of us are barely clinging to our passion to serve.

Each day, I get out of bed, swallow my frustration and disappointment, and pray for the fortitude and resilience to face another workday, because I know that if I can make a difference, however small, it means something. And I know that my patients and their families bring me joy! But each day, my heart breaks a little more. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but this is the world we live in right now.

I am exhausted.”

Lisa Cronk is a pediatrician.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Physicians have gone from being heroes to villains.”

Did you enjoy today’s episode?

Please click here to leave a review for The Podcast by KevinMD. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified when a new episode comes out!

Do you know someone who might enjoy this episode? Share this episode to anyone who wants to hear health care stories filled with information, insight, and inspiration.

Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Lisa Cronk. She is a pediatrician, and she wrote the KevinMD article “Physicians have gone from being heroes to villains.” Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa Cronk: Thank you.

Kevin Pho: We’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you just share your story and journey to where you are today?

Lisa Cronk: So I am a pediatrician. I practice general pediatrics in a suburb of Minneapolis. I went to undergrad at the University of Notre Dame, go Irish, and then to medical school at Mayo Clinic, and stayed there for my residency as well. I trained in that environment where it was “the needs of the patient come first,” and I like to carry that philosophy into my day-to-day practice. I really enjoy working with families and watching children grow and develop over time. I love to watch their progress and their learning and help families keep their children healthy and safe as they grow.

Kevin Pho: What are some of the general challenges that you face every day as a pediatrician?

Lisa Cronk: So we have kind of a dual patient as a pediatrician. We have the patient, who is the child, but we also have the family unit that’s very important in the growth and development of the child. So as pediatricians, we’re having to take both of those things into account. We’re having to address the parents’ concerns and make sure that what they need is addressed, but also make sure that the patient has what they need and that they’re continuing to thrive and to grow and to learn and be healthy and safe. So we have to kind of take both of those things into account.

With the pandemic, obviously, things have been much more difficult: children falling ill, as well as all the changes that have occurred in children’s daily lives that have affected them in physical, mental, and academic ways. So it’s become a much more challenging practice, obviously for all physicians, but also for pediatricians.

Kevin Pho: We’re speaking towards the end of October, and of course the COVID vaccine has been approved for patients ages 5 to 11. What’s the general response of your families regarding the approval of the COVID vaccine for younger patients?

Lisa Cronk: I would say the vast majority are very excited. We’ve been fielding many, many questions about when we’re going to get it, when it’s going to be, and when can we get this going. I think a lot of families are feeling that this is kind of the light at the end of the tunnel, feeling like this is a way that we can protect our children and allow ourselves to kind of lift some of those anxieties, lift some of those restrictions that have been kind of hanging over the heads of our children for almost two years now, and allow them to get some more normalcy back.

There’s still a lot of academic disruption with kids being sick and being quarantined, and a lot of arguments, a lot of difficulty with managing school protocols, and a lot of strife going on in our communities. And so I think parents and physicians, and pediatricians especially, are very excited that we’re able to protect our children. We have a lot of children that have been very eagerly awaiting shots, which is not typical for children.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s transition now to the KevinMD article that you wrote. It’s titled “Physicians have gone from being heroes to villains.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Lisa Cronk: Yeah. So I wrote this back in August. As pediatricians, we usually have a very busy summer of doing school physicals and checkups and preparing for the year ahead, and this summer was very different for us, just because we not only had all our kind of healthy season, but we also had a lot of illness going on. There were a lot of sick kids this summer, COVID, with the Delta variant really affecting children quite a bit, especially given that they weren’t yet able to be vaccinated. And so our summer just got a little insane, and we were all very stressed and all very overwhelmed.

But part of what made it more difficult was all these discussions going on about going back to school, and parents and children very anxious about how this was going to go, all amid kids getting sick and school board fights breaking out at school board meetings and physicians being physically attacked when they go to share information, things like that. So it just became a very, very stressful time, and I saw a lot of my colleagues really struggling.

I’m part of a moms group online, a physician moms group, and we have a pediatrician group, and one of my colleagues, Dr. Ellianne Marty, had kind of highlighted a quote that had been running around about supporting health care workers, because we were struggling to keep our desire to serve. And that struck a nerve, because I really felt like a lot of us were feeling that. We were all feeling kind of that we love what we do, we love our patients, we love what we’re doing, but my goodness, has it been stressful, and a lot of people are burning out. Physician burnout is just skyrocketing.

And so when she had written kind of something similar about, “Gosh, we’re just exhausted,” it stayed with me through the week. Later that week, it had been a crazy, crazy week, and I just stayed up late one night and decided to kind of write how I’d been feeling. I actually just put that on my personal social media account, and the response it got was huge. I wasn’t expecting it. I just thought, “You know, I really just want to put out there how I’m feeling, how some of my colleagues may be feeling.” And there was a big response, so it made me feel that this really resonated with people and that I wasn’t the only one that was feeling this way. So that’s kind of how it came about.

But really, what I talk about in the article is the early days of this. There was solidarity. There was “We’re all against COVID, we’re all fighting this battle together, we’re all doing whatever we can to keep everybody safe and healthy.” There was that community feel, there was that praise, there was that, you know, all these people that are going to work every day when we’re hunkering down: our grocery store workers, our delivery people, our physicians, our nurses. There was a lot of gratitude, and there was a lot of community and solidarity. And then we lost that the further we’ve gone into this.

Understandably, people are tired of the pandemic. People are tired of restrictions and changes to our daily lives, and it’s affecting a lot of people in different ways. We’re all in the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat. So I think that has made it really difficult, because the physicians and nurses and health care providers are still working really hard, and the pandemic is getting harder and harder on all of us, and yet now we’re the bad guys. Now we’re being criticized when we share medical information, when we translate some of this very complex data and this complex information for our patients and answer questions and put ourselves out there to say, “We really want our kids back in school, but here’s a good, safe way to do it.” And we are literally being attacked, verbally, physically, on media. Our practices are being blasted on social media, things like that, when we’re really striving to take care of our patients and to do a good job and to share all that. Now we’re the bad guys, and that’s really difficult, because while we’re all burning out, we’re also being told that our efforts and our work are not valued anymore and that we’re being put down. So that was kind of the gist of it.

I was really struck by an image going around of the physician holding a hospital bed up, and he’s underwater, or he or she is. And what I worry is that there’s a point that that health care provider, that physician, is going to drown, and then where are we at? They’re pushing us to the brink, they’re pushing us to burn out. When we all burn out, who are they left with, right? So that image kind of struck me as, we’re getting close to drowning, and there’s going to be nobody left to pull us out. So that was my, I guess, frustration: There was this “care for your neighbor,” there was this “do unto others,” there was this community spirit, there was this sacrifice, and that was recognized, and that was appreciated, and it kind of gave us the fuel to keep going. And now we’re the bad guys.

Kevin Pho: So when you hear physicians being villainized, verbally harassed, or even attacked, tell me what goes through your mind, and how do you overcome that and go to work every day and be the best pediatrician you can be?

Lisa Cronk: Yeah, I think it’s just frustrating, because I don’t think people realize that being a physician is a service. The majority of people that go into medicine are going into medicine to be of service to people. We care. We go through a lot to go into medicine. I mean, preparing for medical school, medical school, residency, all of that. We dedicate decades of our lives to learning how to care for people and practicing caring for people, and to kind of have all that dedication, all that preparation, all that knowledge, all that expertise kind of thrown back in our faces is very frustrating. It’s very kind of demeaning and demoralizing to have the value that we can offer to people be devalued, be minimized, be rejected.

It’s like, I’ve been tempted to think, “What would happen if I googled something on someone else’s profession and decided to lecture them on it? How would that go over?” It wouldn’t go over well. If I tried to tell a lawyer how to do their job, if I tried to tell an electrician how to wire my house, that doesn’t go over well. And I don’t understand why people think that all our decades of preparation are, you know, debated with a Google search. I mean, it’s very, very demoralizing to feel like we are really working at max capacity, driving ourselves to the point of exhaustion, and it’s not good enough.

I think what keeps us going are the people who do appreciate us. All it takes is a thank-you. All it takes is one patient saying, “We know you’re working hard, and we know you care.”

Kevin Pho: You mentioned that you posted your story on your Facebook feed and you received a significant response. What were some of the things that were said?

Lisa Cronk: A lot of support. A lot of people saying, “We had no idea it was this bad. We had no idea what this has been like.” A lot of physicians saying, “Yes, this is exactly what we’re going through.” A lot of physicians saying that it really hit it on the head.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Lisa Cronk. She’s a pediatrician, and she wrote the KevinMD article “Physicians have gone from being heroes to villains.” Lisa, for those other physicians who are being villainized and demoralized and possibly thinking about leaving clinical medicine because of all the vitriol that’s out there, what kind of advice do you have for them so they can keep going?

Lisa Cronk: I think we really need to look towards the value that we have in each interaction with our patients. So think of that patient that really needs you, that really appreciates you. Where would they be without you? That kind of thing. We are seeing a record number of retirements, or going into non-clinical medicine, or people just flat out quitting. I know nurses and our medical assistants, we are all very short-staffed everywhere. All it takes is, I think, a little bit of finding that patient that makes you keep going, finding that value that you put into it, and realizing that you have value.

Kevin Pho: And my final question, Lisa: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Lisa Cronk: I think we all need to realize that we as a community need to support each other as well, that the culture that we have in this country, or the status we are in right now, is villainizing physicians and is pushing us to the point of exhaustion. And so, recognizing that we need to reach out to each other and realize that we are not the only people doing this. There are all these physicians working so hard, pushing themselves, getting to the point of exhaustion.

We really need to support each other, communicate with each other, share that that’s how we’re feeling, and find ways to bring back kind of that value that we are to each other and that we are to our patients, really sharing that this is going to get better. We are going to get through this, but we just have to make sure that we’re supporting each other through it, because individually there’s no way we can hoist that bed out of the water. We’ll all be kind of holding an end and working together to support our patients and support each other.

Kevin Pho: Lisa, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Lisa Cronk: Thank you, Dr. Pho.

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes