The Friendship Gap in Medicine: Why Women Physicians Feel So Alone | Cassie Burton Greenbaum, MD

The Friendship Gap in Medicine

A physician can spend all day surrounded by people and still have no one she feels she can truly call.

That contradiction sits at the center of my conversation with pediatric critical care physician Dr. Cassie Burton Greenbaum.

After more than a decade in medicine, several moves, marriage, motherhood, and a demanding career, Cassie reached a point when life felt incredibly heavy. She had family. She had colleagues. What she did not have was the kind of deep friendship that gives you somewhere to bring the parts of yourself that do not fit neatly inside your professional or family roles. 

At work, Cassie described feeling her “physician mom armor” click into place. She could compartmentalize, care for patients, and function at a high level.

At home, the effects of her loneliness were harder to hide.

She felt disconnected from her husband, struggled to remain present with her daughter, and realized that underneath physician, mother, wife, daughter, and colleague, the woman herself had gradually become harder to find.

That is one reason physician loneliness can remain so invisible.

Loneliness is not simply about the number of people surrounding us. It is about whether we have relationships where we can stop performing and feel genuinely known.

And when physicians do not have those relationships, the effects can reach beyond the individual.

A spouse may gradually become the physician’s romantic partner, confidant, emotional outlet, caregiver, sounding board, and primary source of support. As Cassie points out, that is simply too much for one person to carry. 

Cassie identifies three barriers physician moms often encounter when trying to build meaningful friendships: limited bandwidth, fear of emotional risk, and container scarcity.

That realization ultimately led her to create Off Service Mom Co., where physician mothers are personally matched with women who understand their season of life.

Because friendship is not an indulgence physicians should save for some future season when medicine, parenting, and life finally become less demanding.

That season may never arrive.

And Cassie offers perhaps the best reason not to keep waiting:

“One day you will look up and need a community and realize that you forgot to build one.”

Listen to the full conversation on The MedLife Support Podcast.

Meet Dr. Cassie Burton Greenbaum

Dr. Cassie Burton Greenbaum is a pediatric critical care physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After more than a decade in medicine and several cross-country moves, she found herself surrounded by colleagues and family but without the deep friendships she needed to sustain her. That realization led her to found Off Service Mom Co., a curated friendship-matching membership that personally pairs physician moms with someone who understands their season of life so that exhaustion, unpredictable schedules, and years of putting friendship last don’t have to be the reason they stay lonely. Cassie’s goal is to help physician moms stop treating connection as a luxury and start treating it as the infrastructure that makes a fulfilling career and life possible.

 Connect with Dr. Burton Greenbaum

To learn more about Off Service Mom Co. and the next cohort, be sure to visit:

Website: offservicemomco.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcassieburton/

Instagram: @drcassieburton

For more episodes of The MedLife Support Podcast that discuss issues of loneliness and the importance of community in physician families, please check out:

Episode 13 Loneliness in Medical Families: Why Connection Matters More Than Ever | Emily Kent, PhD

Episode 14 Community as Care- Why Physician Families Need Community, Not Just Coping | Elizabeth Landry

Episode 25 The Hidden Loneliness No One Talks About in Medical Families | Dr. James Ellis (@lonelinessdoctor)