The patient, a powerfully built middle-aged restaurant worker, had awakened one morning with a tight pain in his shoulders that traveled down his right arm. At work, he could barely shrug his shoulders or turn his head. “My fingers were so weak,” he recalled, “that I couldn’t even get a good grip around a glass of water.”

A senior doctor at a local clinic diagnosed a pinched nerve and prescribed a muscle relaxant. Two weeks later, only more incapacitated, the patient went to another clinic, where a younger doctor made the right diagnosis: A malignant tumor in his chest was pressing against a nerve to his arm.

“That first doctor couldn’t be bothered by what I was trying to say,” the patient said. He was now receiving chemotherapy and was hopeful his cancer had been caught early enough, but the near miss still haunted him. “He acted like he just didn’t want to be there with me. Or with any patient.”

After reading a study published this week in Archives of Internal Medicine, I’ve been thinking a lot about this patient’s experience. And I’ve come to two conclusions. First, the older doctor had classic symptoms of burnout

Read Article: NewYorkTimes

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