There’s no psychic or spiritual reward left in the practice of medicine. From Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. at americanthinker.com:
A new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that nearly 5% of U.S. physicians left clinical practice in 2019, representing a 40% increase in just six years.
It confirms what every practicing doctor already knows: America’s physicians are burning out, checking out, and getting out, with female physicians and those in rural areas being the most likely to exit.
The study, conducted by Rotenstein and colleagues from Yale, UCLA, and UCSF, examined over 700,000 physicians who treated Medicare patients and found that doctors caring for older, sicker, and poorer patients were more likely to leave the profession. Although the paper is descriptive rather than prescriptive, the message is clear — the medical profession is hemorrhaging.
Medicine has become the only profession where the customer isn’t the patient, the boss isn’t the doctor, and the computer always wins.
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The reasons for this mass departure aren’t mysterious; they’re baked into the system.
For many doctors, it’s death by a thousand clicks. The modern doctor’s day is no longer defined by caring for patients but about feeding the bureaucratic beast. Electronic health records were promoted as time-savers, but they quickly became time thieves.
For every hour of patient care, physicians spend nearly two hours on documentation and desk work. None of it enhances health care, but all of it keeps lawyers and administrators satisfied. Sacrificed are evenings with family, replaced by late-night charting marathons to satisfy billing requirements.
The number of licensed naturopathic doctors (NDs) in the US has grown from an estimated fewer than 1,300 in 2000 to approximately 6,000 in 2022-2025. Data for the entire period of 1980-2025 is not a single, continuous series, but available statistics show a significant increase over the past two decades. Naturopathic Doctors in the US (1980-2025)
1980s-1990s: Specific reliable data for this period is sparse, but the profession was much smaller and only licensed in a few states. The number of naturopathic schools was also very low, estimated at one to two dozen during this broader time frame. – 2000: An estimated 1,300 licensed naturopathic physicians were practicing in the United States. – 2006: The number of licensed NDs in the US and Canada combined was 4,010, representing a 91% increase from 2001. – 2022-2025: Current estimates indicate there are approximately 6,000 licensed naturopathic doctors practicing in the US.
The profession is experiencing growth, with demand projected to increase. However, obtaining precise, historical statistics across the entire timeframe is difficult due to varying licensure laws and data collection methods over the years.