New research suggests that physicians may be able to reduce their risk of burnout by reading for pleasure, according to the American Medical Association.
"There is an effect of literature on physicians that nothing else can have," AMA member Daniel Marchalik, MD, said, according to an AMA blog post. "Literature creates attention you really can't create through anything else. ... It creates a better connection to patients."
Dr. Marchalik leads Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University School of Medicine's literature and medicine track, in which medical students complete four years of a literature program. The program consists of reading one book each month and ends with a capstone writing project.
Dr. Marchalik was also part of a research team that surveyed 2,500 physicians about their rates of burnout and reading patterns, as well as their demographic and undergraduate medical education. What Dr. Marchalik and his team found was that reading for pleasure helped physicians practice empathy.
"What [the results] show is those who read literary fiction actually performed better in theory of mind, which is actually a surrogate for measuring empathy," said Dr. Marchalik. "It's doing something special … It is moving the needle on what is probably the most difficult part of burnout to move the needle on, which is depersonalization."
Reading consistently, he added, also reduced the chances of becoming emotionally exhausted or feeling depersonalized. Specifically, the risk of burnout for physicians who read at least one book per month decreased feelings of emotional exhaustion by 19 percent and feelings of depersonalization by 44 percent.