Do something that you can enjoy the good aspects of and deal with the negative.

Good post and a helpful one for the students out there picking a field!

There is so little feedback in radiology, You only hear about your misses. It can be demoralizing at times. Thanks for the comment.

100k for tomo?!? That is crazy.

I also enjoy the procedures. When you get good at them it is actually very satisfying. When I retire this is what I will miss the most, when a patient tells me it was much quicker and less painful of an experience than they expected.

Side note: If you ever have a really great experience with a radiology procedure, drop the rad a quick note. It will take you 5 minutes, but you will make someones day. I remember every thank you note a patient sent me. If you are a referring doc and a patient compliments the rad, pass it on to them. Again it will make their day. It is these little things that make a big difference.

No more film, but you can still look at a screen with the radiologist 🙂

Thanks for the comment. I am a proponent of using the early years of your career to create some financial freedom in your life, so when the burnout sets in you have options to pivot into a job that is fulfilling even if it is for less money. Feeling trapped is the worst part about job dissatisfaction. Maybe one never burns out, in which case they have both a satisfying job and a pile of money. Not a bad place to be.

Good observations VagabondMD. We can’t really know how we are going to change over time. All the more reason to create flexibility and freedom in our lives before we hit burnout.

I found this part of the last question very incisive in regards to physician burnout (at least mine):

“How much would you say that continued learning and building of skills goes on after training? I’m someone who gets very bored if not trying and learning new things, which frankly is starting to seem like a huge strike against a medical career in general. A big plus for radiology is that it seems to have the greatest amount of intellectual material to master, but I’ve also heard a lot that in the private world things can get pretty monotonous.”

I think this is extremely important. Expertise in a well-defined area leads to good patient care and better outcomes medically–but after becoming highly skilled and knowledgable, the routine of seeing patients and diagnosing/prescribing or, in the case of radiology, interpreting images or performing procedures loses its novelty and excitement. Those in specialties seeing patient directly, at least get some feedback, positive or negative. Those in specialties like radiology and pathology–not so much. Has a pathologist ever had a patient send them a card or cookies because of their reading of a biopsy? I doubt many radiologists do either other than, perhaps an IR guy.

In any event, most physicians are very intelligent and curious individuals and medicine is a very wide field that is impossible (as a whole) to master. We can master circumscribed areas however and that makes us very effective and valuable to the medical establishment, but leaves me longing for the days when everything was new, exciting and cool in my training. The loss of that somewhat child-like wonder and excitement is a large part of my own semi-burnout.

For example, our group took a reimbursement and salary hit in the my first few years of practice. But then the health system for its own reasons quickly and universally adopted tomosynthesis (3D mammography) for all screening mammograms, and our salaries jumped by about $100k from one year to the next. Eventually, the government will decide to reimburse less for this, and salaries will do down again.

To be a radiologist in private practice, you have to accept that much of the work will be mundane and rote—with flashes of interesting cases or high pressure situations. You can’t care a lot about interacting with patients. I enjoy the short conversations I have during image-guided procedures, but I don’t miss the headaches and social issues that come with direct patient care.

I’m still keeping my eye out for burnout, but so far so good 🙂