Quotes from the Front Line: Older physicians must 'develop strategies to reimagine our sense of purpose'

Despite having an alternate plan in place once he decided to end his career in clinical medicine, Philip Pizzo, MD, former dean of the Stanford (Calif.) University School of Medicine, said the transition still left him questioning his self-worth and personal identity.

In an op-ed for JAMA, Dr. Pizzo said he had witnessed early on in his career what could happen if one doesn't anticipate transitions, especially during mid-life. To avoid making similar mistakes, he decided he would return to school to pursue a doctoral program in history once he decided to end his career in medicine. But despite planning for the transition, Dr. Pizzo said the change left him questioning himself and his purpose in life; only until he made the transition did he come to understand the importance of accepting new opportunities to renew one's sense of self.

"Despite planning for my own alternate career, the transition from my position was still accompanied with a sense of loss and an unsettling anxiety that affirmed that the distance traveled was much greater than the likely road[s] ahead … I still experienced surprising questions about personal identity and self-worth. Did my knowledge or experience still matter, and was I still relevant or useful? How was I to be seen — or would I even be seen? … Even though my transition was to the full-time faculty, many asked me about how it felt to be retired, and I couldn't escape feeling as if I was being slotted to the past tense … Rather than allowing mid- to later-life transitions to become a loss of opportunity, it seems reasonable to develop strategies to reimagine our sense of purpose in ways that might be transcendent to one's past. Rather than losing the community of our workplace, it seems important to forge new ones that create learning and transition planning networks."

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