Throughout my career I have met doctors with some of the most interesting hobbies — car collectors, wine makers, coffee roasters, and many others. I’ve often wondered whether physicians who have utilized their specialized skills in the practice of medicine have parlayed those skills into hobbies. In other words, is there a connection between physicians’ hobbies and their medical specialty? My take is that doctors’ hobbies and their specialty choices are often inextricably linked.
To be sure, the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn considerable attention to the importance of having a hobby. Physicians under prolonged stress need outside activities to decompress from hard-fought battles lost and won on the COVID front lines.
According to the September U.S. Department of Labor report, 524,000 healthcare workers have left the field since February 2020 — doctors are among them. Of course, it’s impossible to say whether having a hobby would have mitigated the exodus, but the importance of having a hobby has been shown to be crucial in achieving relaxation and work-life balance, as well as coping with anxiety, depression, and traumatic medical experiences.
My son-in-law Austin, for example, is a second-year medical student and an avid gardener. Gardening has allowed him to unwind from the pressure of medical school, while simultaneously parenting a newborn child. Conversely, he feels that gardening has made him a better clinician by teaching him to be patient, learning from failure, and accepting death. Most importantly, gardening has taught Austin concepts related to preventive medicine. “Any gardener knows the importance of their soil’s composition. You need to have the right amounts of organic matter, nutrients, minerals, fungi, and bacteria to give your plants the best foundation to grow … The garden has reminded me that in order to help our patients grow and maintain their health for longer periods of time, we must grant them solid ground beneath their feet and a clinician who can help them when needed,” he wrote in an op-ed.
One of my most influential and admired medical school professors is infectious disease expert Bennett Lorber, MD, a professional painter. Lorber was raised in a family that valued art and music — his cousin is the accomplished jazz keyboardist and Grammy award winner Jeff Lorber — and Lorber has painted since early childhood. He also emphasized the importance of having a hobby as a doctor. “Doing something that is important to you, makes you happy, and keeps you sane is just as important as what you do as a doctor … To best take care of patients, you have to first take care of yourself … I am a doctor and a painter. Painting for me is not a hobby, but rather a calling equal to my calling to medicine,” he said.
Some incredibly talented physicians have found their calling outside of medicine and have left the profession altogether. But the overwhelming majority are satisfied to straddle the fence, like psychiatrist and world-renowned jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin, MD, who maintains a private psychotherapy practice when not recording or touring.
Zeitlin has noted striking similarities between his two vocations: “The psychotherapeutic journey has commonalities with improvising music, which, as a jazz pianist and composer, has been another major passion. Empathy and communication are paramount in both, and I believe my most creative level of psychotherapy and musical expression occurs when I am able to trust that I will be able to bring to bear everything I have studied and learned while simultaneously allowing myself to be so immersed in the activity that I become ‘one’ with it — to merge with the music, the musicians, or the patient and his psychological life. I’ve been fascinated with the nature and challenges of this merger state … The cross-pollination of music and psychiatry has greatly aided me in both fields.”
Success notwithstanding, Zeitlin is quick to add that his musical activities have always remained subordinate to his primary responsibilities to patients and trainees (he teaches at the University of California San Francisco).
The same holds true for general surgeon and kiln-formed glass artist Steven Immerman, MD, who specializes in treatment for pilonidal disease. “Though I was extremely busy, I knew I needed a creative outlet,” he said. “I found I really missed having a hobby in which I could use my hands. I was a surgeon at work, but even at play, I needed to work with my hands.”
Once when Immerman attended a workshop and proposed a project — a block of colored glass with a window through which viewers could observe the contents inside — the instructor remarked, “Well, of course. You’re a surgeon. You make little openings in people and you look inside.”
Immerman has since observed similar parallels between people’s choice of work and their extracurricular activities. Perhaps the most profound parallel can be seen in his own practice, because both surgical and artistic outcomes entail a period of waiting and uncertainty. “They both have a period of time when the process is seemingly out of my control,” he said. “For surgery, it is the patient’s healing process; for kiln-formed glass, it is the time it is in the kiln. Then, hopefully, there is the joy of seeing the finished product in both endeavors.” Immerman also cited the example of a pathologist friend who enjoys astronomy in his spare time. “Both activities consist of looking through a lens and making order out of chaos,” he observed.
I have searched for correlations in my own career, as an established psychiatrist and an amateur musician who collects rock and roll live music recordings. As best I can determine, with psychotherapy as my currency, the flow of the therapeutic conversation (the melody), combined with the spoken word of the patient (the lyrics), unites my practice with my hobby.
The relationship between work and hobbies need not be esoteric. For example, Christos Ballas, MD, a very busy ob/gyn, trains and competes in triathlons. He noted, “My hobby is like my career, a big grind, but a lot healthier than going to work. I train and do endurance events, so when not working I’m swimming, running, or biking and thankful that at 61 I can still do it and practice full scope ob/gyn.”
I invited physicians blogging on Doximity to share their views about the similarities between their hobbies and medical specialties. A plastic surgeon stated that he makes large-scale production model cars. “Maybe my hobby makes me a different kind of ‘plastic’ surgeon,” he surmised. Emergency medicine physician and author Jeffrey Wade, MD, commented, “Stories are a way I receive the world as a big reader and how I report it back. Writing stories from my life has almost been like psychotherapy and gives me individual stories or books to hand out to people who seem like they could benefit from it.”
A retired ER trauma physician stated that he builds and shoots black powder Buffalo rifles from the 1800s and percussion muskets and flintlocks from the 1700s. What a curious hobby, I thought, for a physician who has probably treated hundreds, if not thousands, of gunshot victims during his career. One physician asked, “Since I race cars as my hobby and I am a neonatologist, I wonder what that says?”
My favorite comment, however, came from a psychiatrist who snapped, “I wonder how many people [blogging] here would choose to do medicine as a hobby?”
It’s like asking physicians who hold both medical and business degrees how many of them went to medical school because they couldn’t get into business school? Physicians who are accomplished in their specialties and hobbies usually thrive on the interplay between them. It makes sense that our hobbies reveal a great deal about our passions and the activities that sustain us. Although our hobbies may not always align with our work, it’s possible that the more it does, the higher our level of job satisfaction.
In fact, when graduating medical students were asked to rank the most important factors that influenced their specialty choice, “fit with personality, interests, and skills” consistently ranked the highest, behind specialty content, work-life balance, length of residency, and income expectations. The factors motivating physicians to pursue certain career pathways may be the very same factors leading them to choose lifelong hobbies.
Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA, is a member of the Physician Leadership Journal editorial board, a 2021-2022 Doximity Luminary Fellow, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia.