9 Things I thought I needed to become the clinician everyone sent their toughest case to...That slowly made me question whether I wanted to stay in patient care at all

Here’s 9 lies I wish we’d stop normalizing as “professional growth” for women in healthcare.

Because I don't think they're making us better clinicians.

I think they're teaching us to...

• Lose unnecessary sleep the night before a case we’ve seen hundreds of times

• Argue with each other in comment sections over the most nuanced treatment approach

• Wonder why we're so good at this work... but just don't want to do it anymore

The lie: You must have alphabet soup behind your name to be the clinician I trust with my own patients, family, and friends

The truth:

At this point if your bio looks something like this:

Jane Schmane MD, FACSP, XYZ, LMNOP, RSTLNE...

I'm very clear you're good at sitting in classrooms and taking tests.

I'm not clear you're trustworthy, actually good at what you do, or that you care more about providing incredible care than making sure everyone knows how qualified you are.

The lie: Your career must become your entire personality and you must prove why you’ve earned a life outside of it

The truth:

When you can clearly recite the next 5 courses you want to take, quote the last 3 clinician podcasts you listened to, and you have a bedside table stacked with the return-to-running books your colleagues just published…

...but you can’t answer the question:

"So...when's the last time you did something fun, just for the hell of it?"

This is a signal that your career has swallowed your humanity whole.

The lie: You must prove your clinical competence in public forums

The truth:

If you’re getting off on the need to assert yourself and your nuanced take through a six-paragraph dissertation in the comments every time someone posts,

"Hey...I'm struggling with this patient. What should I do?"

...then I think it's time to step away from the keyboard, Karen.

(This also goes for you if you’re lurking and reading and now feeling terrified to say the wrong thing online. That definitely isn’t growth-oriented. It’s shrink-oriented.)

The lie: You must shame the mean girls and be nice in the name of “collaboration”

The truth:

Calling out the mean girls like Karen, from the previous section? Good. Good start.

But just as you wouldn’t stop your evaluation at "patient with knee pain," don't stop the evaluation at the person being mean.

Yes, the "mean" girl is trying to assert her superiority by putting down another woman's clinical approach, lack of nuance, or too much nuance.

But then there's the "good" girl who asserts her superiority by proving she's nicer, more emotionally mature, and more regulated. Possibly doing the very same thing the mean girl is doing, but now dressed up as more virtuous and collaborative.

But why isn't anyone asking what kind of culture produces both the "finger-pointing mean girl" and the person who is now finger-pointing at the mean girl (both of whom are yelling about it in comments sections online)?

The lie: If you don’t sign up for the course or webinar, you’ll definitely miss that ONE clinical pearl that will revolutionize your patient’s lives

The truth:

When your mentor posts,

"It's 50% off for only 3 more days! Do it for your patients!"

…and you click buy even though you still have three unfinished courses sitting in Teachable.

A 2014 systematic review found that only 10% of healthcare outcomes are driven by clinical knowledge & technical skill. The other 90% comes from the provider-patient relationship—the soft stuff.

And yet, we’re told “if you keep learning, you’ll find new inspiration and help more patients!”

So why are the women with the longest list of certifications often the ones questioning whether they even want to stay in patient care?

The lie: You can only receive care when you’re in a lab course or from your coworker between patients

The truth:

Yes, we need bodies to learn and practice on.

And always volunteering to be the patient model so you can get a free clinical evaluation for the problem you've been avoiding seeing your own doctor about... isn't growth mindset.

Neither is posting in clinician Facebook groups asking your colleagues to interpret your lab results or diagnose your weird symptoms instead of making an appointment.

It's teaching you to approach yourself like a clinician before you ever let yourself be a human.

And it's encouraging you to avoid the individualized, attuned care you actually deserve.

Needing to see a physician, therapist, or receive the very treatment you provide doesn't make you a failure.

It makes you human.

The lie: Turn every wound and personal experience into a puzzle to solve and lesson to teach

The truth:

Reading through your own chart with PubMed and ChatGPT open, treating yourself as a curious case study and puzzle to solve.

Yes, educate yourself. I know you can’t help but find it interesting. I get that.

AND…

It's okay to let yourself simply be a patient—not a case study, not a puzzle, not your next continuing education course.

(Even better: every time you go through something hard, you don't need to go get a certification in that thing and suddenly become a specialist in it.)

Becoming an expert in something doesn't cancel out or exempt you from vulnerability, medical trauma, or really tough situations you might find yourself in.

The lie: Prove you're a team player who wants to grow the profession through unpaid labor

The truth:

Saying we value and celebrate communal, team-focused strengths, then expecting you to volunteer for more committees, mentor more colleagues, work in one more patient at the last minute, and not paying you extra for any of it.

The system has a name for it:

"Being a team player with a collaborative, self-starter, growth mindset."

You just call it free emotional and physical labor.

PS: If you're the one asking for free, unpaid clinical advice in Facebook groups or con ed courses instead of paying a colleague for their expertise, you're contributing to the same systemic problem.

The lie: Turn your moral injury into a personal improvement project

The truth:

The healthcare system runs seminars and courses on how moral injury (the artist formerly known as “burnout”) is an individual failure of time management and work-life balance.

Have you tried growing yourself through mindfulness? Better boundaries? A new nervous system regulation protocol? More exercise? Eating better?

The WHO defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon caused by chronic, unmanaged workplace and environmental stress. And that management comes from the top, not from the women inside it.

Telling a woman managing a full clinical load and an unequal second shift at home to add more things and "ask for support" when the department is chronically understaffed is gaslighting at its finest.

Healthcare has convinced us that growth and success always looks like adding another...

• Set of letters behind your name.

• Marketing mastermind.

• Featured podcast interview.

• Conference keynote invitation.

• Pipeline of referrals.

• "Faculty" next to your name.

  
  

Here’s the irony:

Healthcare understands the biology of growth.

In PT, for example, we understand progressive overload, tissue capacity, integration, and recovery.

We would never progressively overload a tendon, shoulder, or ACL without enough time for adaptation, integration, and processing.

So why do we assume the woman clinician has infinite cognitive, emotional, spiritual, relational, and intellectual capacity?

The healthcare industry keeps telling women to become more credentialed, knowledgeable, and team-oriented—and calls it "growth."

I'm interested in what happens to patient care when we stop asking women clinicians to become more of what the system needs them to be... and start giving them the space to become more of themselves.

To be clear: This isn't an anti-learning or anti-growth or anti-collaboration post.

It's a reminder that you're allowed to stop confusing professional development and personal worth as the same thing.

But eventually, your nervous system will do exactly what nervous systems do under chronic overload:

• You fight (possibly with others in the comments section.)

• You flight (possibly out of the profession altogether.)

• You freeze (possibly terrified to ever say anything online for fear you'll get cancelled.)

• You fawn (by doing almost everything I’ve described here... believing if you can just appear good, accomplished, smart, credentialed, nice, nuanced, regulated, calm, and put together enough... you'll be worthy.)

Your nervous system was never designed to process the amount of information you're asking it to consume in the name of "growth" and "collaboration."

And your body has been trying to tell you that for years.

The problem isn't that your nervous system is failing you.

The problem is that it's working exactly as designed.

And it's inside a system that has learned to leverage it and call it your fault.

Maybe growth looks less like becoming more of what the system needs from you... and more of what you need from you.

90% of what your patients need is already in you. Give it space to breathe.

Keep your eyes on your own paper. You’re not responsible for every other clinician's patient outcomes.

Go to therapy instead of feeling like you need to become the expert on every nervous system regulation tool. Teaching about it isn't the same as knowing it in your body.

Being a clinician is part of your humanity, not all of it. Your 95-year-old self probably won’t wish you'd taken more courses.

If becoming "better" keeps making women want to leave healthcare...maybe we've been measuring growth all wrong.

I can't stop thinking about my colleagues in healthcare who are burning out and wondering where they lost themselves.

Our profession understands human growth better than anyone.

So why are we so bad at applying what we know to ourselves?

You're neurobiologically designed to be curious (dopamine!), want connection (oxytocin!), and feel accomplished (serotonin!).

But you're in a system that leverages that very biology and uses it for its own "growth" and "collaboration"... not yours.

FWIW, I'm not condoning cruelty or saying we shouldn't call it out.

I'm questioning why the evaluation stops at pathologizing and hyper-moralizing the mean woman.

A good clinician gets curious. We'd look at her load, history, environment, beliefs, and wiring.

You know, all the nuanced things you're arguing over in Facebook groups. 😉

Healthcare's answer to its own kind is almost always: Fix yourself using our tools. Even if those tools are the very thing making you lose yourself.

It's the water we swim in, drink, and hand our colleagues and patients every day.

Questioning it can feel like questioning your entire identity.

But that’s just it. It’s not just you that is the problem.

It’s the culture that doesn’t want you to question what it’s taught you to crave.

Neverending growth isn't healthy.

It's cancer.

Neverending input from outside sources isn't healthy.

It's an infection.

Neverending attacking of your own kind isn't healthy.

It's autoimmune disease.

Your nervous system has been telling you this all along.

It's time we stop mistaking overloaded capacity for "good clinician" and "growth."

As long as we keep holding that standard and dressing it up as something it's not, the finish line keeps moving, and you keep erasing your humanity.

You can't change the system. Lord knows, that responsibility can't fall on your shoulders.

But you can choose one tiny act of defiance each day by saying "no" to the Kool-Aid the system has you drinking.

Stick around. This is where we talk about how.

Your turn—reach out and let me know your take on this. No wrong answers!

What do we need to stop dismissing with an "LOL" as "just part of the culture"?

What are the tiny defiant ways you're already saying NO to that culture?

I'd love to hear from you!