The Other Side of Medicine: A Husband’s View of Marriage, Fatherhood & Physician Family Life

For decades, the image of the “physician spouse” has often been remarkably narrow: a woman married to a ma...

Rich, But Not Wealthy: Why Financial Independence Matters in Medicine

There is a particular kind of financial confusion that can happen in a medical family. From the outside, everything looks success...

Medical culture has a long-standing message: keep going. Skip the meal. Finish the chart. Push through the exhaustion. Compartmentalize what happened with the last patient and walk smiling into the ne...

When medicine starts to feel unsustainable, the instinct is often to search for a big answer. Leave the job. Change specialties. Cut back. Move. Start over. Those options may be appropriate for some p...

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 pe...

What Happens When the Physician Comes Home—but the Stress Doesn't?

Medicine teaches physicians how to keep going.

Keep working when you're tired. Ignore hunger. Hold your bladder. Move to the next p...

A physician employment contract may appear to answer one primary question: How much will I be paid? Yet the salary is only the most visible part of the agreement. The provisions buried deeper in the d...

Medical malpractice litigation is often viewed as a legal event. Attorneys become involved. Depositions are scheduled. Court dates are set. Yet for many physicians and their families, the legal procee...

If there's one thing medicine teaches physician families exceptionally well, it's how to wait. We wait for medical school to end, residency to be over, the first attending job to begin, and the schedu...

You can deeply love your spouse and still miss feeling close to them.

For many physician couples, that realization arrives quietly.

There is no major conflict. No dramatic argument. No obvious crisi...