Many radiologists find the practice of medicine stressful. As a result, physician disengagement and depersonalization, sometimes addressed as "burnout," have garnered considerable attention of late 1, 2, 3.Contributors include high personal standards for performance, increasing expectations for productivity, fear of error and its consequences, the rapid pace of change in health care, and innovations in IT.Although in medicine, work-related stress is a relatively new topic of study, other fields have studied it for many years, and their experiences and insights can help illuminate the stress of radiologists. At the forefront of such organizations is the US Marine Corps.
Evolution in Understanding of Work-Related StressThe understanding of work-related stress evolved considerably during the 20th century, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in the Marine Corps [4]. Before World War I, the Marines conceptualized stress injury as the result of physical trauma to the brain, secondary to nearby artillery blasts and the like. After the United States entered the war, the understanding of stress injury shifted from physical damage in the brain to "shell shock," the response of a weak character to severe stress. In managing such cases, the Marine Corps took pains to distinguish between shell-shocked marines and those who were truly medically sick or injured.Although this model succeeded in reducing the number of stress-related medical evacuations from the theater of battle, it carried with it a number of disadvantages [5]. First, it focused purely on occupational
