Celebrating Doctor’s Day

As I think about celebrating Doctors' Day with all of you, it is a bittersweet moment for me: I am stepping down from leadership at ABIM and the ABIM Foundation in September, and retiring from a career in medicine spanning more than 40 years. I can't help but to reflect on my career as a physician and how the profession as a whole has changed throughout the years.

I have been fortunate to have had a very varied career. In addition to 30 years of community practice in internal medicine and geriatrics-serving neighbors, my kids' teachers and colleagues just three blocks from where I live in Philadelphia-I was lucky enough to stumble into a leadership role in an early start-up nonprofit Medicaid Managed Care Plan. The company had the prescient mission of "improving the health of a defined population within a fixed budget," and allowed me to explore and understand health issues from another perspective.

A decade of professional life divided between community practice and medical leadership led to an appreciation of how challenging both are and how different-yet complementary-are the goals being pursued.

Medicine has, of course, changed dramatically over the course of my career, with especially rapid changes in the past decade. But the principles of doctoring have remained the same. I have never found a better definition of medicine than one offered by ethicist-philosophers Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma, who wrote, "Medicine is the intersection of two personal intentions, one seeking help, the other offering it."

We are connected to all our predecessors by that historical continuity of purpose. They may not have been able to measure a serum sodium or known what a platelet is; they may have used mercury or calomel or cupping; but they always had the intention of offering help, and they used whatever tools and resources were available to actualize that intention.

As I look at the many challenges we face today as a profession, how difficult the day-to-day life of physicians has become with encroachments from insurers and government and the internet and lawyers, and even the additional requirements to show we are staying current with our medical knowledge, I am inspired by the example of Dr. Owen Wister, who practiced in the same neighborhood that I did, 100 years before I did.

Dr. Wister saw more than 30 patients a day in their homes; he attended women in labor overnight, and witnessed the most extreme suffering and death of one of his closest friends, who was surrounded by family but no other medical attendants. Reflecting on his experience makes me realize how far the profession has come-how we are so fortunate to have more tools and support available to us. And yet, the essentially human predicaments we confront, and the heroism with which we confront them, are truly timeless.

I know that burnout, wellness and moral injury are major issues among us. The work of being a doctor is really hard, and always has been. We have the privilege of playing a central role in our patients' lives, often in their most vulnerable moments, during an era in which we have unprecedented capacity for healing. My hope for all of us is that, by being in touch with the transcendently important role we play in people's lives, we can tap the energy, strength and heroism that belongs essentially to what we do.

As you celebrate Doctors' Day, I hope you will look past some of the day-to-day challenges to find meaning in your hard work: that may be the most powerful untapped source of energy available to each of us.

Richard J. Baron, MD, President & CEO of ABIM