Don’t Hate Me Because I’m a Doctor
National Doctors’ Day Essay
Let’s begin with a simple truth: no one becomes a doctor by accident.
Becoming a physician is one of the most difficult, purposeful and demanding paths a human being can choose — a decision usually made young, when the heart is still wide open and idealistic. For many future doctors, the dream starts in high school or earlier. It’s the teenager who shadows their pediatrician and decides, I want to help people like this. Perhaps they had someone special in their life who is or was ill; a mother, a brother, a friend… or they were sick as a child. It’s the first-generation college student who sees medicine as a calling, not just a career. It’s the curious kid obsessed with science, anatomy, healing, and the miracle of the human body.
They work and dream hard — harder than most will ever know. AP classes. SAT prep. Volunteer hours. Internships. MCATs. Thousands of hours studying, competing, and sacrificing. When their peers were out partying or finding themselves, they were studying organic chemistry or prepping for interviews. Medical school isn’t just competitive — it’s brutal. And once you're in, it doesn’t get easier. It gets harder.
Medical school. Residency. Specialization. Fellowship. Board exams. Debt. Exhaustion.
It’s a decade or more of delayed gratification — often leaving these aspiring healers in their 30s, emotionally depleted and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before they’ve even started their first “real” job. And what’s worse, many find themselves entering a system that doesn’t reflect the vision they once carried so proudly. Because what medical school didn’t prepare them for was this version of medicine.
A version where healing is often sidelined by bureaucracy.
A version where compassion is scheduled into 12-minute appointments.
A version where protocols, insurance denials, and hospital politics dictate care.
What Medical School Misses
Despite the rigor and depth of medical training, there are critical gaps in what doctors are taught. Most medical schools offer little to no education on nutrition, exercise, lifestyle coaching, or holistic approaches to prevention and wellness. They are trained primarily in diagnosis and disease management — not in how to keep people healthy. Courses on empathy, palliative care, patient communication, and emotional intelligence are often optional or underemphasized. There’s little preparation for the realities of the insurance system, hospital politics, or how to build and sustain an independent practice. Doctors graduate highly skilled in clinical knowledge, yet unequipped for the human, entrepreneurial, and systemic challenges that define modern medicine.
The Hidden Curriculum of Medicine
What they didn’t teach in school was how it would feel to fight for a necessary test or treatment — and be denied by insurance. How it would feel to spend more time typing into an EMR than looking a patient in the eyes. How it would feel to lose sleep not just over life-or-death decisions, but over coding accuracy and malpractice fears.
For general practitioners, the challenges are relentless. Most are drowning in paperwork, insurance back-and-forth, and razor-thin margins. They are the entry point into care, often dealing with patients who are sicker than ever, asking for more, while the system gives them less and less. Many GPs can’t sustain private practices and are bought up by hospital networks or forced out altogether. Those who stay — stay because they care. But they pay a price of the heart and financially.
Specialists, too, face their own set of battles. With higher reimbursements often come greater pressures — productivity quotas, rigid guidelines, gatekeeping insurance protocols, and endless constraints on what treatments can be offered, when, and to whom. The complexity of care has grown. The autonomy has not.
Healing in a Broken System
Too often now, the public sees doctors as part of the problem. And yes, there are those who have become cynical, burned out, or even complicit in a profit-first system. But I urge you to consider this: many of these physicians are also victims of the system. They were trained to heal. But they entered a machine — one shaped by pharmaceutical industry lobbying, regulatory red tape, insurance mandates, and hospital consolidation.
On this National Doctors’ Day, I’m asking us to hold two truths at once:
The system is broken.
And the people who dreamed of healing — the doctors, nurses, and medical professionals — are not the enemy.
The Hidden Cost of Care
We often think of doctors as invincible — high-functioning, high-achieving, endlessly resilient. But behind the white coat, many physicians are paying a steep price, not just professionally, but physically and emotionally.
The toll starts early: long shifts, poor sleep, skipped meals, emotional trauma, and the constant pressure to perform without error. Over time, that stress accumulates — and it shows.
The toll it takes is not just professional — it’s personal. Rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide are tragically high among doctors. Many report deep moral injury: the emotional cost of knowing what care should be given, and being unable to give it. This is not victimhood — it’s perspective.
Studies have found that physicians have among the highest suicide rates of any profession. Female physicians, in particular, are up to 2.5 times more likely
to die by suicide than the general population. Many delay their own preventive care, silently battling anxiety, depression, or exhaustion because they fear losing their license or professional standing if they speak up.
Specialists like interventional radiologists, cardiologists, and cath lab workers face chronic exposure to radiation, increasing their risk of cancer, brain tumors, and heart disease. Watch this introspective documentary on the life of medical professional radiation exposures from PBS; Scattered Denial- The Occupational Dangers of Radiation.
Surgeons and ER physicians endure physical strain, high blood pressure, musculoskeletal injuries, and the corrosive effects of high-stakes adrenaline day after day. And general practitioners? Many are quietly burning out under mountains of paperwork, low reimbursement rates, and patient loads that leave no room to breathe — let alone heal.
And while historically, doctors may have had a longer life expectancy than the general population, recent trends suggest that this gap is closing — or even reversing — especially among high-stress specialties.
These aren’t just job hazards. They’re human costs. Costs most patients will never see. Costs the system rarely acknowledges.
And yet — they continue to show up.
They continue to try.
They continue to care.
Let’s Rehumanize Medicine
We cannot fix healthcare without rehumanizing the people within it. That means creating space for doctors to reconnect with their purpose, have a voice in reform, and reclaim the dignity of their work. It means changing how we educate healers — not just to memorize pathology, but to understand people. Not just to follow protocols, but to innovate. Not just to survive the system, but to transform it.
We also need a broader cultural shift. One that sees doctors not as gods or villains, but as human beings — wildly gifted, deeply trained, and too often, quietly suffering. We must make room for collaboration between patients and providers, for transparency, for trust, and for accountability — at every level of the system, from pharmaceutical boards to hospital chains to policy chambers.
Because if we want a healthier America, we can’t get there by turning against the very people who once chose to heal us.
A Personal Note, From a Mother on the Inside
As a mother and caregiver, I’ve spent more days, weeks, even months at times in hospitals with my children than I can count. At least a third of their preteen and teen years have been shaped by life inside the walls of inpatient units — days filled with rounds, medications, procedures, and prayers. A place we jokingly call Club Med and ourselves “repeat offenders”. Humor helps.
There have been years where I couldn’t count the number of specialist visits on all my fingers and toes. Where my days began not with coffee, but with a knock on the hospital room door: “We’re rounding now.”
I’ve stood beside my children as medical students, residents, fellows, visiting physicians, nurses, pharmacists, nutrionists, child life specialists, therapists, and attendings filled the room. Each morning, the attending leads the rounds — not just to make clinical decisions, but to teach. To model. To guide a new generation. Every bed becomes a classroom. Every decision is real-time medicine, filtered through protocols, formularies, hospital policy, and insurance barriers.
I’ve seen the best of medicine. and worst.
I’ve also seen the system at its most frustrating.
But through it all, I’ve never stopped respecting the people who choose this path.
So on this National Doctors’ Day, I say this not just as an advocate, but as a mother:
Don’t hate them because they’re doctors.
They didn’t choose this path for power.
They chose it to heal.
Let’s give them a system that allows them to do just that.
Jacqueline Capriotti is a mother and lifelong caregiver to two adult children with cystic fibrosis. Her deeply personal journey through the world of rare disease and chronic illness led her to serve on the board of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation – Greater New Jersey Chapter, where she helped initiate the foundation’s caregiver support program. She played a key role in advocating for and contributing to the FDA approval of groundbreaking therapies—including Orkambi, Kalydeco, Trikafta, and Alyftrék—specifically for her children’s rare CFTR mutations.
Jacqueline is the Founder and CEO of Health Revolution USA, a public relations and strategy firm focused on health, agriculture, and community-based solutions. She also leads the Make New Jersey Healthy Again Coalition and the Victory Garden Alliance , a modern revival of the WWII-era Victory Gardens that once fed 40% of the country. Inspired by that legacy, Jacqueline’s work bridges personal experience, policy reform, and grassroots action with one clear mission: to make American healthcare—and our communities—human again. She lives in Monmouth County, New Jersey, where she raised her family and continues to advocate for change from the ground up.