Opinion: Health care providers: canaries in the coal mines of American society?
For hundreds of years, health care providers have been on the front lines of social change. Think Margaret Sanger, a nurse who championed women’s rights and started the organization that later became Planned Parenthood, or Max Recamier, one of the physician founders of Doctors Without Borders, who openly worked against governments fomenting violence.
As we lose more and more clinicians to burnout, our nation is losing some of its most effective agents for social change. And if medical schools choose to heed Dr. Stanley Goldfarb’s recent call to shun “social justice” in medical education (the quotes are Goldfarb’s), then we could very well lose a whole generation of them.
