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Abstract
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After giving the name "burnout" to the experience of being overworked and undervalued and the physician and patient suffering that comes from it, many clinicians have sought to elucidate further what exactly is wrong with the practice of medicine. While "burnout" may adequately capture the emotions of many clinicians practicing medicine within systems designed to value profit over wellbeing, one that creates as many inequities as it purports to cure, within the past few years, the term "burnout" has seemed to not fully capture the experience of practicing medicine in the 21st century.
While burnout is more closely associated with exhaustion and not being able to handle the demands of practicing medicine (Talbot and Dean Citation2018), it suggests that the problem is internal; that a person is weak, and if they had more mental fortitude then they would be able to practice medicine without issue. But if more than one-half of physicians report some form of burnout, then perhaps the problem is not that these very smart and very dedicated people are not mentally tough (Talbot and Dean Citation2018). Moral injury, however, looks beyond the self. It names the conflict that often arises from "conflicted allegiances--to patients, to self, to employers." Moral injury was first used to describe soldiers whose moral and ethical beliefs conflicted with their duties as soldiers (Litz et al. Citation2009). Based on its origins, however, anyone can experience moral injury just as anyone can experience burnout, regardless of profession. Moral injury is the result of our deeply held beliefs conflicting with our occupational duties; it's a conflict between our internal selves and our external environments. And as the world around us continues to demand our labor despite the world around us seemingly being on fire, I recently have been asking, can bioethicists experience moral injury and what would that look like for bioethicists?
Language: en |