Medical student burnout and the challenge to patient care

Pauline W. Chen, MD, offers an essay in the New York Times on her emotionally and physically draining experience at medical school. "I was poorly prepared for many things: the pressure to excel in ways that seemed so far from caring for people; rapidly mounting debts I signed off on every semester; a roller coaster existence from chronic lack of sleep; hazing from the more experienced students and residents; and the realities of patient suffering despite my best efforts," Chen writes.