For the past several years, especially since the pandemic, the percentage of doctors who say they’ve experienced burnout has increased to a dangerous level.
In the 2025 Medscape Physician Mental & Health Well-Being Report, 47% of doctors said they were experiencing burnout, and while that sounds high, that was the first time that percentage had been less than 50% since 2020. A Doximity survey from 2025 found that 85% of doctors in the US say they’re overworked.
We all know physician burnout is a big problem. But is it actually getting a little better? According to the American Medical Association's latest numbers, that's a distinct possibility.
Is Physician Burnout Falling?
In a survey released in April, the AMA said the physician burnout rate, where a doctor experiences at least one symptom of burnout, has dropped to 42%. Meanwhile, the job satisfaction for doctors moved to 77%, an increase from 72.1% in 2023 and just 67.6% in 2022.
Seems like that’s good news.
“This reflects broad gains in engagement, well-being, and perceived support across organizations,” Dr. Bobby Mukkamalahe, the president of the AMA, said in a statement. “However, burnout varies widely by medical specialty, driven by differences in workload, administrative burden, clinical environment, staffing support, and the day-to-day realities of practice. Building effective, lasting solutions requires better understanding where physicians are struggling—and why.”
A few years ago, we wrote about the most burned-out specialties, and it was probably what you expect: emergency medicine, OB-GYN, and oncology were the most-stressed specialties. According to the AMA, not much has changed—49.8% of EM docs say they’re burned out, and that’s followed by urological surgery (49.5%), hematology/oncology (49.3%), and OB-GYN (45.7%).
For what it’s worth, the lowest percentages for physician burnout by specialty were infectious diseases (23.3%), ophthalmology (25.8), pathology (28.3%), and nephrology (29.3%).
While the overall burnout trend is moving in a more hopeful direction, more work still needs to be accomplished.
“It’s concerning because we know from studies published by our research team at Stanford and elsewhere that objective turnover increases and that physicians are more likely to reduce their clinical work hours when burnout is higher,” said Dr. Tait Shanafelt, the chief wellness officer at Stanford Medicine. “And it comes at a time when we’re already projected to be facing large workforce shortages in medicine, including problems with access to care.”
Here are some of the other random thoughts that have been floating through my head recently. In old-school sports writer parlance, we call it emptying out the notebook.
What I Took Away from Die With Zero
A couple of months ago, I finally cracked open Bill Perkins’ Die With Zero, and I got what probably most everybody gets out of it if they’re truly interested in not dying the richest person in the graveyard. Whether it’s the idea of giving money to your kids when they're younger and actually need it, bucketing your time throughout the seasons of your life, or determining the best way to find overall balance in your life, it’s evident why Perkins’ tome is considered a modern classic.
But the most interesting part of the book for me was the idea of retiring on your memories. My wife and I have been intentional as my kids grow up about spending time with them, taking them on memorable vacations, and creating the kinds of family moments together that will stick with them and us forever.
To make his point even more poignant, Perkins tells the story of gifting his physically diminished father an iPad full of digitized memories. To me, this passage was the highlight of the entire book.
“Sure enough, he loved it,” Perkins wrote. “As he sat holding the iPad and watching the video, he laughed, he cried, he reminisced. Too old to acquire significant new experiences, he could still derive great enjoyment from the highlight video . . . That was when I realized that you retire on your memories. When you’re too frail to do much of anything else, you can still look back on the life you’ve lived and experience immense pride, joy, and the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.”
Even after you’ve passed through your go-go and slow-go years in retirement and you slowly meander into the no-go years, hopefully you can always look back fondly on those memories that you spent your whole life creating. The days might be long and the years might be short, but the memories can last forever. Whether it’s rushing through Epcot while interviewing my kids about finance or remembering how the Golden Hour sunlight hit the walls of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, it’s somewhat comforting to note that one day I can derive pleasure from those moments with my family even when I’m too old to experience them again.
Retiring on your memories is the most interesting concept of retirement that I’ve heard in a while—and it feels comforting.
Dirty Fingers
I also recently watched the Death By Lightening limited streaming series, which tells the tale of James Garfield’s rise from working as an Ohio farmer/House of Representatives member to getting elected as the 20th president of the US. All I knew before about Garfield’s life was that he was assassinated rather quickly during his first term. But he wasn’t actually killed by a bullet. He died because of an infection, probably spread by his doctors who weren’t wise to the idea of, you know, washing their hands before inserting their instruments (or their fingers!) into their patient’s wound to try to find a foreign object.
The part that I remember best was Garfield’s doctor—Williard Bliss, who had spent weeks trying to find and remove the bullet that had been shot into Garfield’s back—look at the wound curiously and then just casually stick his finger inside Garfield’s body. No hand-washing, no hand-sanitizing, no germ-killing. There’s no telling where Bliss’ finger had been before.
At some point, I want to write a Financial Wayback Machine column about Ignaz Semmelweis and his discovery of how doctors washing their hands between patients helps keep them alive. Semmelweis’ story doesn’t have a happy ending (neither did Garfield’s story, for that matter), and I haven’t found the right time to pen that piece. One of these days . . .
Gen Z Is Financial Flexing
I love the headline on this USA Today piece: “Gen Z is ‘financial flexing.’ Why they’re going broke to look successful.”
I think many of us in the Gen X/Millennial generations believe that much of what we see on social media is exaggerated or outright fake. That seems to be confirmed by a Credit One Bank survey of 1,000 Gen Z and Millennials, where 51% of respondents admitted to “faking their wealth or success.”
“Decades ago, it was called keeping up with the Joneses, aka your neighbors,” Annette Nellen, a finance and accounting professor at San Jose State University, said, via Reader’s Digest. “Today, social media gives us a lot more ‘neighbors.’”
As per usual, don’t necessarily believe everything you see on social media (unless, of course, you’re only following The White Coat Investor accounts!). Social media doesn’t exist to make you feel good; it only exists to make sure you never stop scrolling on your phone.
More information here:Money Song of the Week
As much as I love Fishbone, I never got to see the funk/ska/punk band live in its absolute prime. The kind of shows where the energy was on full blast, when singer Angelo Moore was performing flips, where the sweat and spit from the band covered the audience like a midnight drizzle, where it felt a little dangerous. I’m talking about the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Fishbone was featured on college radio and on Saturday Night Live.
I’ve only see Fishbone in the 20th century, including earlier this summer, and though the band, in its later years, has always been a fun watch, the most dangerous thing I had to worry about, while in the front row in 2001, was that the pants of Moore, who was clearly going commando that evening, were dangerously close to falling all the way to the ground.
Besides its fast, energetic, and funky style, Fishbone, to me at least, has been truth-tellers. In the early years, the all-Black band sang about racism and economic disparity. In the later years, it has discussed and documented just how darn difficult it is to make a living in a band that never really rose above the club levels (and still, to this day, sometimes opens for bands that I consider far inferior).
In a letter the band sent out at the end of 2025, Fishbone laid out the financial struggles.
“As you know, we tour . . . we have to tour to make a living. These days of streaming, etc., it’s made it really hard. Now, you also gotta understand, even before streaming, past deals with labels and publishing companies, merch companies, etc., there wasn’t any income really coming from that either, so touring has been the real way to make it happen.
Touring all the time is also not good. We did it for decades due to necessity.
But we found out that the more you tour, the more you oversaturate your fans. Play in February, come back in July, and then back in December, [the] majority of you guys ain't coming every time . . . The promoters book us and pay the band based on touring history, so over the years, we went from selling out big rooms, to not selling them out, to moving to smaller venues and selling them out, and then not selling them out. So, guarantees got smaller and promoters showed less confidence.
Touring out of necessity ended up being a negative in the long run . . . Why are we telling you this?
Because there is a lot behind a band. None of us ever made the living I’m sure all of you imagined . . . Going on tour is very expensive, between transportation, hotels, gas, food, salaries and we go bare bones . . . it’s just not as glamorous as one would seem. But when we hit that stage, we never phone it in . . . we give it all for whoever is in the room.”
That passion was always evident in the band’s earlier days when it constantly wrote about the lower economic class and its struggles with money and living. That’s what the 1991 tune So Many Millions is about, where Moore sings about the inner city and the near-apathy many of its residents share when they see how near impossible it is to escape their surroundings (the album is called The Reality of My Surroundings).
As Moore sings,
“Your education will do me no good/In my neighborhood/All that I see is scrapin' and scrounging/In my neighborhood.
If you can show me how to do good/In my neighborhood/Maybe I discontinue my lounging in my neighborhood.
So many millions feel this strong/All these people can't be wrong.”
The Reality of My Surroundings was my introduction to Fishbone, which is still one of my top-10 favorite bands of all time. I’ve always appreciated the horns and the bass playing and the harmony between Moore and Chris Dowd. But its truth-telling and transparency have made me a fan and a supporter for life.
More information here:YouTube Shorts of the Week
Kind of funny how the end of this video about lessons to be learned if you lose at day trading . . .
. . . doesn't line up at all with the beginning of this video.
Anecdotally speaking, do you feel burnout is becoming less pervasive in medicine? Do you have any experience with that? Do you feel hopeful about the reduced percentages?