DarrenLipshitzMD

Summary

• After 15 years of practicing Primary Care, I needed a change....for the same pervasive reasons that we have all heard many times from many people. So, I eventually got Boarded in Addiction Medicine and stopped taking insurance, which has allowed me to have time with patients and to be appropriately compensated for it. It can be a very challenging population to treat, and at times, in order to get to the crux of a patient issue, I have to draw on knowledge acquired in internal medicine, psychology, neurology, cardiology, rheumatology, gynaecology, dermatology along with pop culture, street culture, bacterial culture...oh wait, it’s like I’m still practicing primary care! Without the DRE's.
  
  In retrospect, the career change was timely and I don't think i could have done Addiction Medicine without my previous experience that I had as a Family Medicine doc (including the getting burned-out part, which ultimately led me to to the “quit-practicing-primary-care without-a-plan-in-place” part, which ultimately led to Board-cert in Addicion Med)! Stepping away from Fam Medicine without a plan wasn't as scary as it may sound because, as a physician, I knew that I could always get a job.
  And that last part is really one of the invaluable benefits to being a physician. There must be some irony somewhere in there.
  Changing careers was also due to an approach to life which i learned from a patient, turned great friend while he was still alive...he would say, "if you're not having fun in life, then do something different, because life can be hard and can be cruel, so it's the least we can do for it to all make sense". Be it job, relationship, location...I strongly recommend taking the "am i having fun?" test, and if the answer is “no” then make a change...otherwise, you’re doing yourself a disservice.