Do yourself a favor: Leave the country and see how health care is abroad

CRAIG BOWRON, MD AND PETER MELCHERT, MD | PHYSICIAN | NOVEMBER 16, 2017

Here’s some advice for your career in health care: Leave the country as soon as possible.

This has nothing to do with the president’s attempts to euthanize the Affordable Care Act. Or with EMRs, Medicare reimbursements, or the burnout surveys you get from your employer, who also sends emails aimed at getting you to work faster and more efficiently.

It’s none of that. You need to leave the country, just for a week or two, and provide medical care to someone who would have a hard time getting it without you. Go somewhere where the waiting room is a line at the clinic door: no 500-gallon aquariums, or tapestry-sized TVs dangling from the wall. You need to go somewhere where your patient took a 10-hour bus ride out of the Agrarian Age just to see if you can help them. You need to see how the other half lives, the much larger “half” of the world that doesn’t enjoy anything near our standard of living.

Full article here.