Physician wellness programs keep doctors captive

You can’t yoga your way out of burnout—but you can wellness your way into staying stuck

A couple of years ago, the American College of Surgeons recently announced its new well-being initiative for surgeons. Their wellness program has lofty goals:

[The ACS] recognizes the need to foster well-being, resilience, and work-life integration for all surgeons, regardless of their career stage. Fostering the growth of both the surgical expertise and the person as a whole is paramount.

On the face of it, this sounds awesome — resilience, well-being, work-life integration, and fostering growth of the person as a whole — all coming at a time when surgeons and other physicians are burning out and leaving their work in droves, and when the suicide rate among physicians is twice that of the national population.

But wellness programs don’t work — at least, not in the way that increases actual physician wellness.

What they do instead is keep physicians indentured to the system that burns them out in the first place.

(Though my focus in this essay is on physicians, my concerns about wellness programs also apply to nurses and other health care workers.)

Let’s start with the data. Research into physician wellness has grown exponentially since 1995, peaking in 2020 when a pandemic burned everyone out. And then…it dropped: