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Editorial Comment 2/11/2020: Over-reaching
Editorial Comment 2/11/2020: Over-reaching
I’m a great one for castigating politicians. For dishonesty. For perfidy. And for that most corrosive of flaws, hypocrisy. I can put my burner on high blue flame, when some stridently vocal Defender of the Faith gets caught in flagrante delicto with some poor hotel staffer. So I can only assume there is something particularly distorted in the mirror of my behavior when I contradict what seem to be my own values.
The case is this. In the past weeks, I have chided medical students, resident physicians, at least two physician colleagues, and a good selection of non-medical friends for over-working. More correctly, for assigning work a higher priority than maintenance of self and relationships. The most recent was in an advising session with a dozen medical students (all levels), in what our school calls a “pod,” on Friday. I conducted a verbal inventory of which they are, at least the 4th-year students, heartily weary: “In the past 48 hours, how many of you have had good sleep (whatever period you have discovered over the years to be necessary to feeling rested when daylight returns)? How many of you have had a wholesome balanced meal, of which you would not be ashamed to report to your mothers? (This last is again not an entirely reliable assay of effort, as so many of our students live with their parents…) How many have had an hour or more of challenging exercise? (I don’t get more specific than this. For obvious reasons.). How many have engaged in meditation, or some variant on mindfulness and a moment of studied peace? And how many have expressed your gratitude to or affection for someone? (This last can extend to pets.)” All of this is an effort to get them to pace themselves, to be humble about their capacities and realize that commitment means being willing and capable, both. I regard these as personal values worth transmitting; and I realize that to consciously transgress them is hypocrisy.
So today I find myself working on presentations that are crashing down upon me like an avalanche. And while we don’t generally have avalanches in Hawaii, we do have occasional landslides and lava flows and hurricanes. Those bearing down fast are:
- Death and Its Place in Recovery
- Forensic Considerations in Addiction Medicine, focused on the recovering physician’s worries as much as on his professional needs as an expert
- Cultures of Addiction and of Recovery
- A Review of Addiction Medicine for the Primary Care Practitioner
- A History of Addiction Treatments & Addiction Science
- Suicide in the Community with Active Addiction; and Suicide in the Recovering Community
- An Integrated View of Addiction Treatment Policy Beyond Opioids
- Anticipating the Intervention and Treatment Needs of the Next Decade
I am horrified. I have likely left off a couple; which is a problem with memory that only compounds the problem. The list does not include the recurring topics that are taught to medical students and residents as part of their scheduled didactic diet;while two have been topics previously developed and delivered, even those need profound revision.Out of pride and vanity, and with a deluded sense of my capacity, I voluntarily agreed to these commitments, in other cities and states, some within a week of each other.
Please understand. I retired from my medical school’s Dean’s Office almost 3 years ago, with the explicit intent of making a good job of my unpaid avocations: physician wellness, ASAM and similar volunteer organizations, this Weekly and other writings, community governance of our university, that sort of thing. The fun stuff, that we all promise ourselves, as an entitlement of later age. Yet, in making these commitments, I am now guilty of exactly the overextension whose avoidance I stridently beswore, self-righteously demanding the same of my students. I have become a hypocrite.
*Sigh*
That’s all. That’s all I have any business saying or writing, this week.
- Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM