Somewhere along the decade-plus in training, physicians are imbued with a damaging idea: that we can’t succeed anywhere outside of medicine. Keep your head down, we’re taught. Don’t ask too many questions. And the age-old line: You may not love your work anymore, but who else will hire you?
In May 2025, after three years of full-time practice as an ENT surgeon, I left clinical medicine to find that out for myself. Along the way, I realized something: One of medicine’s best-kept secrets is hidden even from physicians themselves: The very tenacity, intelligence, and follow-through that made them doctors can help them succeed almost anywhere.
My decision followed more than a decade of preparation and investment: five years of ENT residency, four years of medical school, one gap year in outcomes research, four years of college. At 18, I had chosen an identity, and a path for myself that I did not reconsider until I turned 30. By then, staying would cost more than leaving.
That cost is literal. For many physicians, student loans are one of the strongest tethers to medicine.
Even without that burden, the financial calculus of leaving is daunting. My parents poured nearly everything they had into my education. Walking away meant reckoning not only with my own career but with the weight of that sacrifice. I spent my years as an attending physician saving aggressively, paying off debt, and living far below my salary so that, when the time came, I could afford to walk away.
I wrote about the toll of that reckoning in my debut memoir, “Surgeon on the Edge,” which traces the years I spent white-knuckling my way through residency training — the abuse, the sleeplessness, the slow erosion of the person I was before medicine got ahold of me. I remember lying on the floor of a hospital bathroom in bloodied scrubs, pager in one hand, phone in the other, waiting for the crying to stop so I could go back to work. Those moments are what led me to finally give myself permission to walk away.
And what I found on the other side was not failure. It was the beginning of a life I actually wanted.
I am far from alone. In a 2024 McKinsey survey, 35% of physicians said they were likely to leave their current roles within five years; of those, roughly 60% intended to leave clinical practice entirely. A Doximity report published this year found that 74% of women physicians have considered a career change — compared with 62% of men — driven largely by overwork and a compensation system that continues to shortchange them.
In stark contrast to the “good old days” of medicine and surgery, nearly 78% of physicians are now employed by someone else, rather than working for themselves. Physician autonomy has been siphoned away from us, gone before we could sound the alarm.
I wanted that autonomy back. But once I decided to leave clinical medicine, I had to determine viable career pivots by auditing my transferable skills. What transferrable skills does a doctor have? “Transferrable skills” is not part of the medical school vernacular. We are taught and tirelessly honed to become one thing: practicing clinicians or academic researchers. Physicians don’t even know how to answer this question about transferrable skills because they are still stuck on two questions:
“How could I leave? Where else could I go?”
These questions carry particular weight when you consider what happens to physicians who feel they cannot leave. Physician suicide remains a crisis: historically under-studied, routinely glossed over, and poorly understood. A 2024 meta-analysis in The BMJ, spanning 39 studies across 20 countries, found that female physicians face a 76% higher risk of death by suicide than the general population.
Physicians need a stark reminder of their own worth — not just inside the hospital, but as high-achieving professionals with vast professional options. Physicians deserve much better than to feel trapped in the careers that they’ve given up so much life, time, and energy for.
There are echo chambers in physician communities online, marinating on these questions and trading pearls on escape. The Facebook group “Alternative Careers for Doctors” has more than 46,000 members.
I searched high and low for over a year and found the three major buckets for physicians who leave clinical medicine: pharma, insurance companies, or traditional medical writing. None of these appealed to me … and I left anyway.
Today, I am a consultant in digital marketing and strategic communications, particularly for companies building products or brands for medical audiences. I’m also a literary nonfiction writer, podcaster, and co-founder and CEO of the Hippocratic Collective, a physician media company focused on storytelling, career diversification, and systems change in medicine. I created the job that I wanted and found proof that MDs are valuable assets to teams even beyond the hospital walls.
But this didn’t happen in a single brave leap. It happened in small, unglamorous steps. I reached outside the echo chamber in medicine. I took meetings with people who didn’t spend their formative years studying anatomy like me. I said yes to conversations before I felt ready. I tried my hand at countless projects that went nowhere. I failed repeatedly — publicly, privately, awkwardly. I learned how to introduce myself without hiding behind my degree and credentials. I learned how to pitch myself not just as a physician, but as a strategist. A writer. A builder. A person with judgment, taste, and the capacity to execute.
Medicine trains us extraordinarily well, and not just in clinical skill, but in synthesis, communication, leadership, and stamina. Those skills are transferable whether we acknowledge them or not.
You don’t fall into a life beyond medicine. You build it. And if you built yourself into a doctor, you can build again.
Frances Mei Hardin, M.D., is a writer, consultant, and former ENT surgeon. Her debut memoir, “Surgeon on the Edge” (Hippocratic Press, February 2026), chronicles the arc of physician burnout through residency training and her decision to leave clinical medicine. She is the CEO and co-founder of the Hippocratic Collective, a physician media company, and host of the podcast “Surgeon, Interrupted.“
