How radiologists can tailor their careers to prioritize personal well-being
When it comes to major career decisions, radiologists whose choices are driven by intuition and self-care might be less prone to stress and burnout than those who base decisions on external influences and pressures, one physician wrote in a Journal of the American College of Radiology editorial this week.
Matthew S. Davenport, MD, of the department of radiology and urology at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor, said in JACR radiologists often have to make tough decisions when carving out their careers, including some that pit family and personal well-being against meaningful medical work. The choices follow physicians through medical school, residencies and fellowships, Davenport said, all the while becoming “increasingly pointed and derivative”—and it’s important to recognize they can be painful.
“There is torment in differentiation,” Davenport wrote. “All parts of the mental writhing exact a toll.”
Radiologists can also perceive making life-changing career calls as losing other opportunities.
“With every path that dissipates, we become less pluripotential,” Davenport said. “We are not regenerating stem cells; we are red blood cells with a circulating half-life and we weren’t born yesterday.”
He said that, in his experience as someone who often helps mentor colleagues through hard decisions, he thinks physicians struggle with choices—like academic versus private practice, clinical versus research paths or funded versus unfunded work—because they know that choice also demands a permanent sacrifice. And when you add personal care to the equation, that sacrifice can start to weigh heavy.
“Sure, you can take a few years off to work on ‘you,'” Davenport wrote, putting himself in the shoes of an academic radiologist. “You’ll take a hit to your national visibility and fall off the ‘power curve,’ and Lord knows if you’ll be recognizable when you find your way back. But you’ll see your kids, rekindle the joy in life and greatly lessen the chance your spouse divorces you.”
At the same time, he said, “scientific discoveries aren’t made from 9 to 5.”
When sorting through challenging career choices, Davenport has a five-step protocol that starts with acknowledging the fact that the decision is a difficult one. He then said it’s important to sort through the possible options and identify which are best personally and which might be influenced by internal and external pressures. If the best option isn’t immediately clear, he said, physicians should do some thinking about their core values and align those values with the available options.
Davenport then moves to his third step, understanding the interests motivating the decision, before innovating options that weren’t initially under consideration. It’s important to take personal wellbeing into account, he said, which is why he ends his process with a reminder.
“Realize that every decision brings loss because parts of an identity—imagined or real—are being sacrificed in the wager,” he wrote. “Loss brings grieving, and that grieving requires preemptive attention. Much of the pain in personal decision-making is here, not in the facts that separate the choices.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.