So You Want to Be a Doctor? Medicine as Instrumental Job vs. Sacred Vocation | Dr. Farr Curlin

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 11, 2021 to the Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt Medical School chapters.

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About the Speaker:

Farr Curlin is the Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin’s ethics scholarship takes up moral questions that are raised by religion associated differences in physicians’ practices. He is an active palliative medicine physician and holds appointments in both the School of Medicine and the Divinity School, where he is working with colleagues to develop a new interdisciplinary community of scholarship and training focused on the intersection of theology, medicine, and culture.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:02.8	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.1	Burnout is a concept that has been popularized.
0:15.9	Its most sort of most known theorist is Maslach. And she has described burnout or defined burnout as a
0:27.4	prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. And it is
0:34.0	defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.
0:40.7	Every major medical center now has efforts to respond to clinician burnout,
0:46.2	including, I'm sure, Vanderbilt University.
0:48.5	It certainly does certainly have a couple of different initiatives on that front at Duke.
0:57.0	So how should we make sense of this phenomenon? I want to think about that with you guys,
0:59.0	and how should we respond to it?
1:01.0	The typical response within the world of healthcare
1:06.0	is to mobilize self-care, as the term is called, and to seek to help people find more work-life
1:15.1	balance. I mean, just today, I was invited to yet another wellness round, and I did not go
1:23.3	because I don't find these particularly helpful personally, but afterward I got an email with instructions for five-minute chair yoga, right?
1:31.1	These kinds of things are going on everywhere, help self-care and work-life balance.
1:37.7	And there's two problems, I think, at least with this response.
1:48.0	The first is it doesn't really fit the story I told you of this young woman and countless stories about others like her. It's not the case that at some
1:54.8	point she stopped caring for herself and therefore became burned out. It's not the case that at some point
2:03.6	she stopped doing other things in life and therefore her work-life balance got out of kilter.
2:11.6	Rather, what she's experienced is that her work has become you might say morally as she
2:21.3	experiences it morally insignificant or kind of deflated when she goes to work
	...

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