(WARNING: This link will take you to an excerpt from an interview. If it will torque you that it's not all there, STOP NOW! If, however, it prompts you buy an issue of The Sun, your money couldn't be better spent! Still some keen observations and experience in what you can read here.)
As a girl Pamela Wible had recurring dreams in which she’d find dying people, bandage them, take them home, and nurse them back to health. She knew even then that she wanted to be a doctor. Wible became a family physician, believing it would allow her to serve not just her patients but also their families and communities. At the age of thirty-six, however, after working in six different clinics in ten years, Wible was ready to quit. Rushing through thirty office visits a day, she wasn’t meeting her patients’ needs — or her own — and she grew so depressed she stopped working.
Wible’s depression lasted six weeks before she was, as she recalls it, “jolted out of bed” with a vision of how healthcare could be. Within weeks she led a series of healthcare forums in Eugene, Oregon, where she lives. The ideas gathered at the forums became her business plan, and within months she’d launched a clinic designed entirely by her community.
At her two-room office in the basement of a wellness center, Wible is not just the doctor but also the receptionist, the nurse, the bookkeeper, the insurance biller, and the janitor. Yet she works only part time, sees patients for up to an hour apiece in a living-room-like setting, and makes house calls. She is relaxed and quick to laugh. She even finds time to travel the country and encourage other doctors to leave what she calls “assembly line medicine” and to create clinics in collaboration with their communities.
Wible’s not alone in her dissatisfaction. A recent Physicians’ Foundation study of twelve thousand U.S. primary-care physicians found that 78 percent of them believed medicine was either “less rewarding” or “no longer rewarding,” and 76 percent said they were either “overextended and overworked” or “at full capacity.” Another study shows that physicians can experience “empathy burnout” after seeing just ten patients in a day; most doctors see three times that many.
Wible was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a lesbian psychiatrist and a Jewish medical examiner. Her parents’ marriage didn’t last, and she spent part of her childhood in Philadelphia with her father and part with her mother and her mother’s partner in rural Texas. She says living with two lesbians “on the buckle of the Bible Belt” forced her to develop a sense of humor. With her father Wible spent much of her time in the morgue. She also accompanied him to his part-time jobs at a jail and a methadone clinic, where he introduced her as a “doctor-in-training.”
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/407/who_will_heal_the_healers
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