Interview with Dr. Elizabeth Poorman, Internist at Cambridge Medical [Show Summary]

There’s a lot of talk (and only that) about burnout and depression among medical students, residents, and physicians, but Dr. Elisabeth Poorman is attempting to do something about it. Listen in to today’s episode and understand a bit more about the realities of working in a field where you can’t always save your patient from suffering, and how important it is as a doctor to take care of yourself first, so you can then effectively take care of others.

Taboo No More: Depression & Burnout in the Medical Field [Show Notes]

Our guest today, Dr. Elisabeth Poorman, is an internist at Cambridge Medical. She grew up in Chicago, attended medical school at Emory, and did her internal medicine training at Cambridge Health Alliance where she now works in Everett, Massachusetts. Her primary patient population is immigrants and those dealing with addiction. In her spare time, she also writes, movingly and well about the challenges facing physicians and physicians in training. Her writing has appeared in Doximity, Kevin MD, and other sites on the web.

Can you tell us about your background? Where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:57]

I was one of those weird kids who always knew she would be a physician. I loved to rush to people who were injured, take care of them, was always fascinated by the human body, and being a doctor was always something I wanted to do. I will admit I did feel less sure for a brief period in college. Much of the path to medical school has nothing to do with medicine. I was taking chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, etc., and I enjoyed the contents of the courses, but they more served the purpose of weeding people out of medicine as opposed to opening up your mind to the possibilities. I was looking at the people around me who seemed very sure of their path and didn’t feel like I fit in with them. The ironic thing is that most of them ended up going into investment banking anyways. In retrospect they were very high achieving students who saw medicine as a good financial decision at the time but then made a different choice to make more money and ended up washing out of medicine. After a little bit of working after college, with non-profits and doing international work, I realized I really did want to pursue this path so I found my way back.

Can you talk a little bit more about your project in Brazil? [4:43]

I did my undergrad thesis on leprosy in Brazil. I was so fascinated with it, and continue to be with the ways patients were treated and mistreated. The experience has repeated itself in different countries in different ways. Patients have been separated from their families, experimented on, had their children taken away. I was incredibly lucky to spend so much time living in the colonies, seeing many who have been cured of it but with long-lasting effects. I am fascinated with the ways science and medicine were manipulated for political reasons. Leprosy is not a very contagious disease, actually, and being in close contact isn’t necessarily going to give you leprosy - no one who worked in the colonies got it. By creating these colonies it was an easy way to say they were doing something about the problem but also having full dominion over patients to experiment on them. It is a really dark chapter in medical history, but what was heartening was that people I worked with didn’t tell me not to go to medical school. They said, “Remember our experience and how wrong things can go,