Are doctors healthier than the rest of the population?

[GreenLight23]

I don’t mean particularly in terms of leading a healthy lifestyle. I am thinking more that they can diagnose themselves if they’ve got an ache or a twinge or an unusual symptom. They know if it’s serious or not and they know what treatment they need. For example, can they avoid strokes and heart attacks more than the general population?

Is there anyone here who is a doctor or has one in the family? What do you think?!

Haha no.

In my old life I was a cleaner. The Dr's home I cleaned had not one bar of soap or hand wash in any of the 4 bathrooms or toilets. Their kitchen bin was always overflowing.

I know a dietitian and she works in the gastro / intestine department sorting patients' diets after surgery.
Unfortunately they don't seem to be involved with the general hospital food production.

They also advise on what patients in ICU should be getting.

And yes she eats very healthily, all fresh home cooked foods.

That was in reply to Muddays post.

@LeavesOnTrees that's kind of my point. Your dietician friend is clearly helping people in need of their expertise which is admirable. I'm sorry if I've been flippant about their genuine lifesaving contribution to many patients' welfare. But diet experts not being involved with 'general hospital food production' makes all the other patients sound like battery hens who should hoover up some kind of communal gruel and just get on with it.

That just seems crazy...you arent robots you still have basic needs like everybody else. Yes its dissapointing if you miss calls but surely it should be a case of well one person simply cannot function non stop without the need to toileting, food and drink and thats just how it is. Really showing my lack of knowledge on this now but are their not people who are assigned to bring drink and snacks around periodically for workers especially in A&E depts? It sounds like one of these jobs where you have to sometimes allow yourself to meet your basic needs and accept the guilt that comes with it.

I’m a GP - didn’t realise the bleeding and crippling abdominal pain was a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Didn’t even realise I was pregnant. Still not sure how I got pregnant!
I think most doctors are from more privileged backgrounds than average which comes with a lot of health benefits - but we’re pretty crap at self diagnosis.

are their not people who are assigned to bring drink and snacks around periodically for workers especially in A&E depts?
😂😂😂
These days you are lucky if there is even something available to buy in a lot of hospitals!
Out of hours catering for staff has been slashed in most places. When I first qualified back in the 80s the hospital I worked in had the canteen open for staff 24/7 so if your first chance to eat a meal all day when you were on call was 2am at least someone would cook you something hot. Now the legal requirement to provide hot food for staff is commonly covered by having a vending machine with ready meals in it and a microwave. And if you get there at 2am and it's empty, tough shit.
The last Christmas I worked before I retired the staff canteen didn't open at all on Christmas Day or Boxing Day and the vending machine was empty by Christmas Day evening so even if you did get a break there was nowhere to go. Fortunately there were lots of chocolates and mince pies on the wards.
I can think of one occasion in 30+ years when my employer brought drinks for staff, and it was only because we were threatening to down tools. An absolutely baking hot Saturday afternoon in the middle of the Summer, windowless theatre suite in an old hospital with basically non functional air conditioning, another 12 or so hours worth of operating booked for the on call team still to get through and every single drinks machine in the hospital empty. The temperature in the theatre suite was about 30c and one of the nursing staff who was a union rep had been trying to get something done all day and he eventually called the on call manager and said our working conditions were illegal so we'd be stopping work if it wasn't sorted. Obviously we couldn't really, but it did prompt the manager to show up with a big bag of cold cans of pop and an ice cream for everyone. That's the one and only time in my NHS career, from medical student to consultant that anyone was officially assigned to bring me a drink. Obviously there have been plenty of times that colleagues of many kinds have made me a cup of tea but that's because they're decent human beings, not because it's their job.

Doctors on here, is it your experience that there's a high proportion of ND people in the medical profession? The two exercise-obsessed, very thin doctors I mentioned in a previous post both talk openly about being autistic and both say that among their university cohort the majority were, in their opinion, ND. I'm fortunate enough not to have had too much interaction with the medical profession as a patient, but I can certainly think of a couple of discomforting encounters with GPs whose behaviour is most easily explained by that.

The emergency medicine consultant I mentioned previously talks about liking emergency medicine because there's less talking and social interaction required and because the buzz and stress of it is what she needs to function at full capacity. She hated her time doing paediatric, geriatric and general medical rotations because she was required to talk to and listen to patients and it was that aspect of the work she most disliked.

I'm married to a senior Dr and have been with him since he finished med school

No they are not healthier except I would say less of them smoke generally (DH made me give up just after we met)

From our experience think they are terrible for stress, quite a few drink too much and enjoy good food, cheese, red meat etc a bit too much and don't exercise enough (time being a major factor) or get enough sleep but they are aware of this, just the jobs don't allow them to control this enough to make a change. DH has got better this year by demanding a small reduction in hours (&salary) because he was overwhelmed but that's hard to do until you are senior.
DH doesn't look out for his asthma until forced to (time again & he thinks our GPs are useless - they are)
However we also know quite a few drs who are into sport in a massive way (mountain biking, ultra marathons, triathlons etc) so it's hard to generalise, they generally don't have kids or the whole family competes together.

DHs sympathy/empathy for illness is non existent - generally if it's not going to kill you he's not too bothered, I suspect that's because he works in an acute specialty so sees serious illness and death a lot.
Can be tricky as I have a long term chronic condition and I'm not sure he got how difficult it could be until I was acutely unwell with it whilst pregnant, he's better since then but if he's had a hard work week there is no sympathy left for everyone else.
He's also blasé about injury /illness in the kids which can be helpful (calm head when they had a head injury) but also annoying. Thankfully I have a fairly sensible head for this stuff.

I wouldn't say so in my experience @Pluvia . Some, obviously, but definitely not the majority.
Particular specialties, and even subspecialties,do have a tendency to appeal to doctors with particular personality traits and skill sets of course - you don't get many wild extroverts going into radiology or pathology in my experience - but I wouldn't say I have worked with a particularly high proportion of ND doctors. And I'm an anaesthetist, which is is specialty that I could imagine appealing more than most to doctors with some ND conditions so I'd expect to have a lot of ND colleagues if that was the case. I've definitely worked with some ND individuals, and probably more than say my paediatrician friends will have, but overall I'd say we are a pretty mixed bag with no one particular type of person predominant.

Not my experience at all - there are one or two, particularly trainees in difficulty (which is how it comes to my attention) but most people are if anything too far the other way. We have lots of highly anxious, brittle perfectionist girls with no boundaries between home and work instead.

Very hard to succeed in my specialty without good interpersonal skills. In a specialty like surgery where it matters less, ND doctors may be more prevalent.

Wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that doctors with ADHD gravitate to ED though - the pace and variety must be perfect for them.

Thanks for the responses. And for this insight too:

Not my experience at all - there are one or two, particularly trainees in difficulty (which is how it comes to my attention) but most people are if anything too far the other way. We have lots of highly anxious, brittle perfectionist girls with no boundaries between home and work instead.

Easy to understand how the anxious perfectionists are the ones to get the kind of A level results required to get into medicine and then pay the price by being permanently stressed. Makes me think of Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt. Do they develop better boundaries and lose the anxiety, @Saschka, or do they spend their entire careers worrying?

I'm outraged on your behalf that the absolute basics of reasonable quality food and drink and short breaks to take them aren't available. Worrying to think that that a doctor or nurse treating me in hospital might be dehydrated, have low blood sugar and be so stressed they haven't slept properly for weeks.

I found the last two I saw a bit exhausting as I didn't feel well and they were so lively. It was like being with excitable labradors.

I knew a young doctor who drank and smoked quite a lot. Actually I did used to see her at parties!

My friend's doctor died young (40) of cancer.

Do they develop better boundaries and lose the anxiety, or do they spend their entire careers worrying?

I’m seeing a subset of trainees in difficulty, so the ones I am seeing are by definition the ones who are not coping and who are going off with stress. Of that cohort, some drop out, some change specialties to something less immediately stressful (lab-based like micro or histopathology, where they can stress over minutiae as much as they want).

Consultant-wise, we have one or two who spend their entire lives at work but even those people are far less stressed than the trainees. Nobody can stay permanently stressed for 40 years.

We have a few hyper-competent overachievers, and most of us are fairly normal people. Long hours, but these days a lot of admin can be done at home after kids’ bedtimes etc, so most people are out of the door by 6pm. I do two late nights (10pm or later), to blitz my admin each week. The rest of the time I finish at 3pm to do the school run, and finish off at home later.

I don't think the level of neurodivergence in the doctor population is any higher than in any comparable profession and people on the autism spectrum can make excellent doctors. But I look back to the 1980s and 1990s, when autism was much less readily diagnosed, and wonder if it would explain some of the behaviour of some of my colleagues at the time. Some people may also have gone into medicine looking at it as a way of resolving trauma of their own, in the same way as people with mental health problems sometimes choose to become counsellors.

Anecdotally, people with psychopathic traits can do extremely well in some specialties, and I've certainly come across doctors who were meticulous in the care they gave to their patients but who didn't care whose necks they broke in their rush to get to the top of their profession.

I don't think you can generalise Saschka.
I'd say I was far more stressed as a Consultant than a trainee, especially later in my career when I had responsibilities that I didn't even know existed when I was a junior, never mind worried about. The decade or so that I spent as a Clinical Director were without doubt the most exhausting and stressful years of my life and I turned down an Associate Medical Director post because I could see how much worse it was for those above me in the food chain.
I'd say that most of my Consultant colleagues experience significant work related stress and that for a significant number, especially those in clinical leadership roles, it's extreme.And virtually all the Consultants in our department work longer hours in a typical week than any of our juniors. It's a different kind of stress to that experienced as a trainee of course and it will vary from place to place and specialty to specialty but certainly in my experience becoming a Consultant is very much out of the frying pan into the fire.

I’ve seen the stress vis my daughter, and I’d like to thank you all for your dedication. I hope the government recognises this with better pay and working conditions. I can totally see why strike action is necessary

My neighbour is a GP and is severely overweight and has very poor mental health and social skills. Her two children are very overweight, spoilt and lacking in social skills so based on her alone. No.

I also dated a doctor that completely disregarded covid as being a risk to anyone and NEVER stopped seeing others even when having direct contact with covid patients.

Quite the opposite, most have signs saying no drinks at the desks (patients have complained about delays if see drs sat drinking at the desk). Toileting was less of an issue as if you didn't have time to drink then didn't need to wee. I commonly remember coming home after 13h shift and barely making 5ml of pee. The bleeps for jobs are just never ending and the staffing levels so poor you are basically firefighting on call running between sick patients. I always manage to eat on shift now, but most days I'm eating lunch at around 4pm which is my first drink of the day after 6am

My family members utterly refuse to seek appropriate medical treatment for their kiddos until they are really needlessly unwell. Equally they don't seek help when they should for themselves.

I've got Google. I can do the same

Not in France it seems.

Aww thank you for being outraged. It actually means a lot. I was pregnant and fainted on the ward and somehow got blamed for it. It was too much, going up and down the stairs one hundred times without a proper break/food. Apparently when I raised my concerns on my risk assessment that wasn't enough. ???

Hey ho. You get used to it or absolutely sick of it and quit? ...

Going all day without food and drink while you're pregnant? How can that possibly be acceptable? I'm just thinking back to 1998, when the colleague I worked next to was pregnant and we were all shifted around so that a sofa and footstool could be brought into the office so she could have a lie down while she took two-hourly breaks from her onerous desk job designing magazine pages...

Re the mortality rate of medics and the fact that despite being doctors they don't seem to live any longer than average... I've heard a number of doctors, including retired ones, saying that having seen what they've seen during their careers, they'd refuse treatment if, say, they developed cancer after the age of 75. Do you think that has any bearing on the mortality rate of medics?