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Physician assistant David Olson discusses his article, “Taking a break from medicine: a journey to rediscover joy and purpose.” He describes feeling trapped in an unhealthy, borderline abusive relationship with medicine, citing normalized disrespect, intense pressure from employers focused on metrics over provider well-being, and the demoralizing impact of system failures, particularly during and after COVID-19. David shares his experiences with dwindling job satisfaction as a hospitalist facing staffing instability and later in the “wasteland” of primary car. He highlightsg how burnout severely affected his marriage and his relationship with his children, leaving him exhausted and short-tempered. Realizing incremental changes weren’t enough, David and his wife made the drastic decision to take a year-long break from medicine to travel the world with their three young children, prioritizing family, joy, and quality of life over salary. This journey is his attempt to rediscover purpose and hope, offering encouragement to other health care professionals facing similar struggles to challenge limiting beliefs and consider bold changes for their own well-being.
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Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome David Olson. He’s a physician assistant. Today’s KevinMD article is “Taking a break from medicine, a journey to rediscover joy and purpose.” David, welcome to the show.
David Olson: Thanks. So, I’ve spent the last 12 years working and living in Oklahoma. I spent 10 years as a hospitalist and then the last two years in primary care for a value-based system, and really during that time got pretty burnt out. I spent a couple of years on the leadership team at the hospital system, saw our group change out, and we were taken over from a hospital-owned company by private equity companies that are taking over so much in medicine these days. So, I went through a lot, saw a lot of people come and go, and really got to a place where I was pretty burnt out and realized that I needed a break.
OK. I talked things over with my wife, and we made the decision just to take a year off and go travel the world with the kids. I felt like in medicine, we often take our families for granted, and they kind of get put on the back burner while we’re dealing with other things. This was a chance to really make up for that and try and make sure that I don’t miss out on everything that’s important when it comes to family. So that’s kind of what the article was about.
Kevin Pho: So tell me, before you made the decision to travel the world, what were some of the specific things about medicine that were burning you out and taking away your time and energy from your family?
David Olson: Just a lot of it was patients these days; you deal with just so much grief. They don’t trust you. They’re mad at you no matter what you do. You give them good medical advice on how to manage their diabetes, and they just completely ignore you and say, “No, I’m not taking anything. I’ve decided somebody told me CBDs fix my diabetes,” and these things that you just want to go pound your head into the wall. And you’re being judged on whether you’re taking the meds when it comes to Medicare and everything, and it just gets frustrating.
In the hospitals, it was really getting frustrating with the company that I worked for. If you were busy and you worked extra, that was just part of the day. But if there was ever a slow day, they’d say, “Well, let’s send you home,” or “Let’s send you to a different facility.” So you didn’t know where you were going to work from one day to the next. That gets frustrating if you have things planned and you think, “Oh, I’m working two minutes away from my house,” and then you wind up being shipped to a hospital that’s an hour away. That kind of screws up your day.
So, lack of continuity when it comes to the hospital system, like I said, just some of the frustrations with patients. Those were just a few of the things that were burning me out. And then I think for me, being on the leadership team also was one of those things, particularly being on one during a transition period where over 90 percent of the providers left during the transition. So going through that was definitely stressful as well.
Kevin Pho: Now give us a sense of how long you were practicing before taking this break.
David Olson: 12 years. So, it had been pretty much nonstop. I went 10 years without ever changing jobs, essentially. And then when I did change, I took a month off, and we actually went and spent three to four weeks traveling around Southeast Asia. So we kind of had a little bit of a taste of this two years ago, and that was part of what led us into thinking about this as more of a longer-term thing. That was a fun adventure. We got to see and do a lot of things, but at the same time, it’s still just a small little window, particularly because there’s such a big world to see. I love to travel, and there are so many places I want to see and experience with my family.
Kevin Pho: Now, how much of the burnout is attributable to the company, the specific company you were working for, versus primary care or hospital medicine as a whole?
David Olson: I think it’s definitely a mix. The companies I was with definitely played a role in that. But then again, time-wise, I think I just needed a little bit of a break. When you’ve got patients who are threatening you, making threats like, “Well, my last doctor was shot and killed, and I’m going to start hurting people if I don’t get my pain controlled,” and things like that, you’re just like, “Man, I need a break. I need some time away.”
So I think it was definitely a mixture of everything combined. I actually was at a conference where I was talking to a guy, and we were talking about burnout. He had actually taken a year off, just a year break, and then came back to medicine afterwards. And he said, “You know, you sound like you need a break.”
Kevin Pho: Yeah. So what was that conversation like with your wife when making the decision to take this extended break away from medicine?
David Olson: She was actually very open to it, very supportive. I think she realized some of the struggles that I’d been dealing with, some of the frustrations that I’ve had for a while. So it was actually fairly easy because it was something we’d kind of talked about in bits and pieces before. But it was actually easier than you’d probably think.
Kevin Pho: So how long have you been away from medicine? How far into your trip are you?
David Olson: I left my job in December, and we started traveling in January. So we’ve been traveling a little over three months. We’re in our fourth country, and we’ve got rough plans for the next couple of months. Then we’ll spend a couple more months in Asia, and then we will head to Europe after that for the second half of the year, and we’ll kind of just go from there.
Kevin Pho: And was there any reaction from friends, family, colleagues when you decided to take this extended break from medicine?
David Olson: It’s kind of a mix. A lot of people just say, “Oh, that’s so awesome. I wish I could do something like that.” I definitely get a lot of those responses. And then a lot of people are also like, “What about your family? Are you going to take your family?” And I’m like, “Yeah, they’re coming too.” So it’s a little bit of both.
There’s definitely, like I said, that segment who’s like, “Oh man, I want to do that, but I don’t think I can.” I think that’s most people’s reaction to something like this: “Oh, that sounds great, but I can’t do it.” In reality, it is very doable. It just forces you to think about things differently. It forces you to make some decisions about how you want to survive over a year. But it’s something that just about anybody really can do. In the medical system, I mean, I’ve been a PA for the last 12 years. My wife stayed at home with the kids, so we’re a single-family income, and it’s doable.
Kevin Pho: Now what separated you from your colleagues? Because so many of your colleagues said they wish they could have done what you did but couldn’t. So what made you different in terms of following through with your decision?
David Olson: A lot of people think about stuff and plan on things. They have analysis paralysis, but they never take that final step to actually become a doer and actually take that last step. In areas of life, I’ve kind of felt like that at times, where you think about it for a long time and you’re like, “Oh, well yeah, I should go ahead and buy that property or do that.”
I think I was just to the point where I needed a break. It seemed like it was a good time with kids. They’re young. I figured if we’re going to do it, this is a good time. The girls are five, my son’s eight. Do it while they’re not super established, they’re not going to miss anything, and they can pick up things pretty quickly. So it just seemed like it was a good time to do it.
I know one of the things that a patient actually said early on when I started working that really stuck with me was how they’d spent their whole life working. They just retired, they had all these big plans, and they said, “Now I can’t stay out of the hospital.” That was one of those things where I thought, “I don’t want to be that guy.” I don’t want to be that person who’s sitting there later in life and just regretting all the things they wanted to do. So I decided this was a chance to actually make a change, get out there and travel, see the world with my kids and family, and just take a mini-break.
Kevin Pho: Now have you thought about your medicine plans after your break? Have you put some thought into what you’re going to do next afterwards?
David Olson: A little bit. I’ve just started thinking about that really over the last couple of weeks. I think it’s one of those things. I’m going to take some time, probably over the next couple of months, trying to really figure that out: What do I want to do? Where do I want to be? When we go back, I don’t know that we would necessarily go to the same area we were in Oklahoma or whether we might try to be somewhere closer to family. So I started thinking about it a little bit just because oftentimes with medicine, you do have to plan ahead.
Kevin Pho: So what kind of advice do you have for your colleagues who may be in a similar position to where you were? They’re burnt out, having a difficult professional practice situation, and are thinking of maybe changing careers, changing jobs, or even taking an extended break like you have. What kind of advice do you have for these people?
David Olson: I would say do it. It’s very doable. Most people look at this and just say, “Oh, that’s so great, but I can’t do that.” And that’s just a limiting belief. It’s something that anybody can do. It just takes some time and some research, some education on figuring out the best way to travel, how you can do it on a budget, how you can do it with a family and with small kids. So there’s a way to do it, and it’s very doable.
So it’s one of those things I would tell them: anybody can do this. You can do it. It doesn’t have to be a year; it could be six months. If anybody ever had any questions, they can always feel free to reach out to me. I’d be happy to talk people through it if there was anything they wanted to know.
Kevin Pho: Any feelings of guilt from taking this extended break from medicine? As a PA, of course, you devoted a lot of your education towards becoming a PA. Physicians devote a lot of time as well. Any guilt from taking this extended break from something that you trained so hard to become?
David Olson: No, from that standpoint. I think the guilt that I felt the most has actually been when my kids talk about how they miss stuff from home. That’s been the guilt I’ve felt, when they talk about missing friends or missing school. That’s the hardest part that’s been for me from a guilt standpoint.
Kevin Pho: We’re talking to David Olson, he’s a physician assistant, and today’s KevinMD article is “Taking a break from medicine, a journey to rediscover joy and purpose.” David, what are some take-home messages you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?
David Olson: Yeah. I think the important thing is, if people are dealing with burnout, to realize that it’s OK to take a break. It’s OK to take some time off to self-reflect, to try and look at other opportunities, to just take some time off with family to recharge, to make sure that you’ve got your priorities straight and are focused on the important things.
Kevin Pho: David, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.
David Olson: Thanks.
