By Henry Buchwald, MD, PhD
The term “burnout,” or job-induced emotional exhaustion, was first introduced into the medical lexicon by Freudenberger in 1974.1 Since then, burnout has become a descriptive pseudoscience of definitions and metrics, a phenomenon to be studied, categorized and reported. What have we learned about this state through our studies? Is burnout a disease in search of a remedy?
In a recent (2016) national survey by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical