One of the biggest challenges physicians face when they leave clinical practice is feeling like they have lost their professional identity. After decades of education, training, and patient care, medicine can become so deeply connected to a physician’s sense of meaning that simply stopping work can create an unexpected feeling of loss, uncertainty, or even crisis.
That issue is at the heart of the SurgeonMasters coach Joseph M. Kaczmarczyk, DO, MPH, MBA, Medscape article, “‘Always a Physician’: Retirement’s Biggest Test Isn’t Money.” The article explores the often overlooked fact that retirement isn’t simply the end of a job. For many physicians, retirement can feel like losing a core organizing structure of their identity.
When Medicine Becomes Identity
In the Medscape article, Dr. Kaczmarczyk, DO, MPH, MBA uses a Jenga tower to illustrate the problem many physicians encounter upon retirement. Remove one critical piece and the entire structure can collapse.
Medicine is rarely just an occupation. Physicians spend years becoming physicians: first attending medical school, then residency, fellowship, and decades of practice. Along the way, medicine becomes intertwined with relationships, responsibility, and purpose.
That conditioning is enormously valuable during practice. But it can make retirement psychologically difficult.
The Retirement Plan That Isn’t Enough
Kaczmarczyk approached retirement with research, planning, and preparation, assuming he was ready, but he wasn’t.
His plan “failed miserably.” He experienced what he describes as an existential crisis, questioning who he was, his worth, and his legacy.
A financial retirement plan can answer:
- How much will I need?
- When can I stop working?
- Where will I live?
But it doesn’t answer:
- Who am I now?
- What makes my days meaningful?
- Who needs me?
- What am I good at?
As physicians, we shouldn’t try to erase our medical identity. Even if we retire from clinical practice, we should never retire from our purpose.
The Physician Brain Doesn’t Retire
Medicine rewards vigilance. Physicians are trained to notice abnormalities, anticipate complications, and ask what could go wrong. These skills are invaluable in clinical practice but they can be exhausting in retirement.
The habits developed over decades don’t disappear when the schedule becomes empty. Physicians may still feel responsible, solve problems, and put other people’s needs ahead of their own.
Physicians may not need to retire from medicine. They may need to retire from the version of medicine that no longer fits their lives.
That could mean mentoring, teaching, precepting, consulting, writing, advocacy, or helping underserved patients. It could also mean doing something completely unrelated to medicine while carrying forward the values developed through a medical career.
The key for physicians is to retire not only from something, but toward something.
Special thanks to Joseph M. Kaczmarczyk, DO, MPH, MBA, for his contributions, insight, and support in strengthening the SurgeonMasters community.