Teaching the Art of Medicine to Restore Physician Well-Being

Physician burnout has been framed for years as a problem of overwork, inefficient electronic health records, and inadequate resilience training, but a new commentary from Harvard Medical School psychiatrists argues that the deeper wound may be something far less measurable: the loss of generativity, the fundamentally human drive to create, mentor, and pass one’s craft on to the next generation. In a paper published in Academic Psychiatry, Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni and Dr. David A. Silbersweig of Mass General Brigham make the case that the well-being of physicians cannot be restored through wellness apps and yoga sessions alone, because what is eroding is not merely energy but meaning. Their essay, titled “I Will Teach Them My Art”: Reclaiming Generativity to Improve Physician Well-Being, draws on developmental psychology, health services research, and the authors’ own institutional experience to propose that teaching, mentorship, and creative contribution to the profession should be treated not as luxuries competing with clinical productivity, but as core determinants of a sustainable medical workforce.

The concept of generativity comes from the developmental theorist Erik Erikson, who described it as the psychosocial task of middle adulthood: the impulse to nurture successors and contribute to something that outlasts the individual. Erikson warned that failure to achieve generativity produces stagnation, a state of self-absorption and arrested development that resonates, the authors suggest, with what medicine now labels burnout. Nadkarni and Silbersweig argue that physicians enter the profession with generative ambitions intact — the title of their commentary evokes a master craftsperson’s declaration of intent to transmit hard-won skill — but that the structural evolution of academic medicine has progressively stripped away the conditions under which that impulse can be exercised. When a clinician’s day is fully consumed by relative value units, documentation quotas, and administrative compliance, the activities through which generativity traditionally found expression, such as bedside teaching, long-term mentorship, scholarly creativity, and the careful shaping of young minds, are squeezed into the margins of professional life.

The timing of the commentary is significant. Recent large-scale studies have documented troubling attrition signals across academic medicine. A 2023 analysis in JAMA Network Open by Ligibel and colleagues found that well-being parameters were strongly associated with academic physicians’ intention to leave their current institutions, suggesting that departures are not random events but the predictable output of environments that fail to sustain their workforce. More recent work published in 2025 and 2026 has sharpened the picture further: researchers including Silver and colleagues and Carlasare and colleagues have shown that a physician’s sense of belonging within an organization independently predicts burnout and work intentions, even after accounting for workload and other conventional metrics. Belonging, the Harvard authors contend, is itself closely intertwined with generativity, because people feel they belong where they are needed as teachers and creators, not merely where they are consumed as labor.

The commentary situates this argument within the broader political economy of American health care. Citing recent scholarship on the corporatization of medicine, including a 2025 New England Journal of Medicine perspective by Fuse Brown that attempts to define what health care corporatization actually means, Nadkarni and Silbersweig describe a system in which hospitals and practices are increasingly run on industrial logic. Efficiency, throughput, and standardization are legitimate goals, but they carry hidden costs when applied without counterweight. The 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on clinician burnout emphasized that professional well-being requires a systems approach rather than individual coping strategies, and the Harvard authors extend that logic: if the system is the cause, then the system must also make room for the generative activities that give clinical work its meaning. A health care organization that optimizes every minute of physician time for revenue-generating activity is, in effect, optimizing away the very thing that keeps physicians in the profession.

The authors also point to the measurable burden of administrative and technological demands. Studies of electronic health record use, including a 2023 JAMA Network Open analysis by Rotenstein and colleagues of system-level factors governing primary care physicians’ EHR time, have documented how documentation and inbox management consume evenings and weekends, displacing not only rest but the discretionary professional activities — teaching, research, informal mentorship — that function as psychological ballast. From the generativity perspective, this displacement is doubly damaging. It exhausts the physician and simultaneously removes the outlets through which exhaustion would otherwise be counterbalanced by a sense of contribution. The result is a professional identity reduced to production, which the authors argue is psychologically untenable over a career spanning decades.

What distinguishes this commentary from much of the burnout literature is its constructive proposal. Rather than ending at diagnosis, Nadkarni and Silbersweig argue for the deliberate institutional cultivation of generativity as a retention and well-being strategy. They cite evidence that structured mentorship programs in academic medicine produce durable long-term benefits; a widely cited 2018 study in PLoS ONE by Efstathiou and colleagues at a major academic center demonstrated sustained positive effects of a faculty mentoring program on career satisfaction and professional development years after its implementation. They also draw on the wellness-centered leadership framework articulated by Shanafelt and colleagues in Academic Medicine in 2021, which urges health care leaders to treat physician well-being as an organizational responsibility requiring the same rigor applied to quality and safety. In the generativity model, leadership means protecting time for teaching, rewarding mentorship in promotion decisions, and designing career pathways in which senior physicians are expected, and empowered, to pass their art to juniors.

The authors’ institutional vantage point lends weight to the argument. Both write from Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham, one of the largest academic medical systems in the United States, at a moment when even the most resource-rich institutions report difficulty retaining faculty. Their commentary, published as a perspective piece rather than an empirical study, does not present new data; the authors explicitly state that no data were generated for the manuscript. But the essay is grounded in the accumulating quantitative literature it cites, from JAMA Network Open studies of intention-to-leave and belonging to the National Academies consensus report, and its contribution is conceptual: it reframes the physician well-being crisis as a crisis of developmental fulfillment. That reframing matters because interventions follow frames. If burnout is understood as fatigue, the remedy is rest. If it is understood as moral injury or lost meaning, the remedy must restore purpose, and purpose in medicine has always been relational and generative — the transmission of judgment, skill, and compassion from one generation of healers to the next.

The phrase in the commentary’s title — “I will teach them my art” — echoes a sentiment as old as medicine itself, enshrined in the Hippocratic tradition in which master physicians bound themselves to share their knowledge with students as a duty alongside the duty to patients. Nadkarni and Silbersweig suggest that modern academic medicine has quietly abandoned this covenant, treating education as a cost center rather than the lifeblood of the profession. The consequences compound across generations: senior physicians who cannot teach produce junior physicians who never experience being taught, and a culture of transactional, time-limited clinical encounters replaces the apprenticeship model in which professional identity is forged. Restoring generativity, in their view, is therefore not nostalgia but workforce strategy — a way to make academic medicine a place where careers can realistically span thirty or forty fulfilling years rather than ending prematurely in resignation.

The commentary also carries implications for how institutions evaluate physicians. Promotion criteria in academic medicine have long struggled to weight mentorship and teaching comparably to research funding and publication counts. If generativity is central to well-being, then the metrics by which physicians are judged and advanced should reflect it, a point consistent with recent findings that faculty who report a strong sense of belonging are less likely to intend to leave. The authors’ argument aligns with a growing movement in medical education research to treat belonging, meaning, and professional identity formation as measurable outcomes in their own right, not soft amenities. It also connects to the literature on early-career transitions in academic medicine, which describes the vulnerable period when new faculty, often abruptly stripped of the structured mentorship of training, must find their footing; how institutions support — or neglect — that transition shapes whether generativity takes root.

The essay is unlikely to settle debates about the root causes of physician burnout, which remain contested across occupational health, health economics, and medical sociology. But it adds a distinctive and humane voice to the conversation, insisting that the physician is not merely a worker whose hours can be managed but a practitioner of an art whose transmission is essential to both the practitioner and the profession. As health systems confront record levels of clinician attrition and a projected shortage of physicians, the Harvard authors offer a deceptively simple prescription: let doctors teach, let doctors create, let doctors pass on what they know. The evidence they assemble suggests that institutions that take this seriously may find it among the most cost-effective investments they can make in the well-being and longevity of their medical workforce.