When young people go to medical school they are called medical students. They know that they are to learn about medicine. Everything about medical school is about learning about medicine. In fact, every waking moment is about learning about medicine.

We learn about anatomy, physiology, statistics, how to read a research paper, how to do a research project, we learn about diseases, pathology, histology, how to examine patients. We learn the right questions to ask in the right way to get the information that is needed.

We endlessly learn about rare diseases, treatment protocols and how to do various procedures and operations.

Our whole lives are consumed with medical information.

But is this all that there is to medical school?

Of what value is all the medical knowledge in the world if the person holding that knowledge is miserable and unwell themselves, struggling to work and struggling to cope with people?

Of what purpose is it learning everything that there is to learn about ‘medical knowledge’ if we are not preparing our students to be well in life? Continue reading →

As doctors and as medical students we hear a lot about this thing called ‘work life balance’. We know that we need it, we are told that we need it but we are not really told what it is, why we need it and how to get it.

By the very notion that it is called ‘work life balance’ we learn that ‘work’ is a harmful thing to be minimised and that ‘life’ is something completely different, something that we are missing out on when we are ‘working’. This actually only compounds the stress that we are feeling when ‘work’ is ‘taking up’ our time!

It’s definitely unhealthy for us to be working all the time, to the extent that we neglect other areas of our health, physical well-being, neglecting exercise, neglecting good nutrition, neglecting our relationships, our emotional health and well-being and neglecting the need that we have for sleep or rest, or even perhaps other aspects of expression that we feel are vital for our health and well-being.

But work itself is not an issue. HOW we work can be an issue.

We are told that work life balance is taking days off, taking holidays, making sure that we have hobbies etc and we might think that it is having time to go out to restaurants for dinner. These things are fantastic and fun, but on reflection, are these things truly what create consistent day to day great health and well-being for us?

We know and we are told that we need ‘work life balance’ to stop us from burning out or from getting sick. It is important for Continue reading →