These Are the Doctors Most Likely to Burn Out

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 28, 7:30AM EST

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These Are the Doctors Most Likely to Burn Out — © Wavebreakmedia / iStock via Getty Images

At one point, not terribly long ago, the picture of doctors was people who had spent endless years getting educations, made a great deal of money and took every Wednesday off. Whether that is true or not now, the life of a doctor can be grueling. The COVID-19 pandemic has robbed thousands of doctors of their practices. Many of these worked in specialties in which people had to come to offices to be examined or have surgery that was elective. Without “rainy day” funds to bridge them over these months, the costs to practice became overwhelming.

The lives of other doctors became challenging as they treated tens of thousands of people in hospitals, particularly in cities where the COVID-19 pandemic caused a huge influx of extremely sick patients, some of whom died. Some of these physicians worked endless hours. Others became infected themselves.

“Burn out” is defined as a condition in which people become so ill or exhausted from their work that they cannot function. Medscape’s recently released its Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2022: Stress, Anxiety, and Anger report. The study questioned 13,000 doctors in 29 specialties between June 29 and September 26 last year. According to a Becker’s Healthcare article on the Medscape study, “Across all specialties, 47 percent reported feeling burned out last year.”

The list was topped by emergency room doctors at 60%, followed by critical care doctors at 56%. Each of these specialties had many doctors on the front lines of treating patients with COVID-19 infections. At the far end of the list, public health and preventative medicine doctors posted a figure of 26%.
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These are the 20 specialties where doctors are most likely to report burnout:

Emergency Medicine (60%)
Critical Care (56%)
Ob/Gyn (53%)
Infectious Diseases (51%)
Family Medicine (51%)
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (50%)
Diabetes and Endocrinology (50%)
Radiology (49%)
Pediatrics (49%)
Pulmonary Medicine (48%)
Gastroenterology (48%)
Internal Medicine (48%)
Urology (48%)
Anesthesiology (47%)
Rheumatology (46%)
Neurology (46%)
Surgery, General (44%)
Cardiology (42%)
Allergy & Immunology (42%)
Nephrology (40%)
Plastic Surgery (40%)
Ophthalmology (40%)
Psychiatry (38%)
Otolaryngology (37%)
Orthopedics (37%)
Oncology (36%)
Pathology (35%)
Dermatology (33%)
Public Health & Preventative Medicine (26%)

Click here to read about the highest paid doctors in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.