Keeping Stress Under Control While Treating Patients

If you want to help your patients deal with their stress, you have to learn to handle your own.
- Dr. Matthew Budd, Harvard University

Stress is one of the most common health problems. For an Ophthalmologist, stress is a kind of material where he can use himself as a reference point. By having a better understanding on stress, one can derive professional as well as personal benefits.

There are various causes of stress which can be categorized into two namely,

• External - criticism from people, death of a person close with us, anger.
• Internal - created internally inside us due to various reasons and not something specifically.

To master stress, one must change. One must figure out what is contributing to his/her problem and change it. The change fall into 4 categories:

• Change your behavior
• Change your lifestyle choices
• Change your thinking
• Change the situation you are in

There are various symptoms of stress but generally they fall in four categories:

• Physical - insomnia, muscle ache, fatigue, chest pain, nausea, trembling, flushing of sweating or frequent cold.
• Mental - decrease in concentration, indecisiveness, confusion, loss of sense of humour, mind going blank.
• Behavioural - nervous habits like nail biting, drinking, yelling, smoking, pacing, throwing things.
• Emotional - anxiety, anger, frustration, nervousness, impatience, fear, worry, short temper.

Some ways to master stress are Regular exercise (at least 30 minutes, three times per week), Leisure time (do something for you everyday), adequate sleep, relaxation exercise like meditation, decreases consumption of junk food, healthy diet.

Lowering stress in the field

• Avoid over-scheduling your personal life- as it may cause huge stress
• Don’t let patients wait too long – as most understand the need to wait if an emergency arises, but if it happens frequently, they will get frustrated and you will have a very hard time justifying it. To avoid this problem, try to keep the visiting patients in a realistic number. Also check your schedule few days early to reschedule patients on a less busy day
• Carefully choose the people you give your time – the time is worth thousands of dollars, and losing it will add stress. Make sure the time you devote to medical reps are worth.
• Minimize competition between professional partners – compete with yourself rather than competing with your fellow professionals. Set goals and try to accomplish it and grow day by day.
• Hire surgeons who have additional skills – hiring energetic, bright and hard working partners who have business savvy in addition to great surgical skills will minimize your stress to an extent.

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