One hundred alcoholic women in medicine. An interview study

Physician Substance Use by Medical Specialty

“…These same two specialties also had higher rates of self-reported substance abuse and dependence. These findings are consistent with earlier observations from impaired physician treatment programs and studies of residency trainees suggesting that Emergency Medicine 1,4,8,11 and Psychiatry 3,4,9 have higher rates of substance use, abuse and dependence. The low overall rate of substance use in Anesthesiology was also found in a national study of residency trainees.…”

“…Specialties identified with higher rates of substance use include Anesthesiology, [1][2][3] Emergency Medicine, 4,5 Family Practice, 1,2,6,7 and Psychiatry. [2][3][4][5][8][9] Specialties that appear to have lower rates of substance use and abuse include Pathology/Radiology 5 and Pediatrics. 1,2,4,5 Despite some apparent consensus on specialties with higher or lower substance use rates, few studies of individual specialties have used methods similar enough to permit direct comparison of results.…”

“…1,2,4,5 Despite some apparent consensus on specialties with higher or lower substance use rates, few studies of individual specialties have used methods similar enough to permit direct comparison of results. In addition, most of the reported investigations have studied physicians in a single treatment program, 1,[5][6][7][8][9] at only one stage in their careers, 2,4,5 or in a single geographic region. 2,3 Another gap in the published evidence on physician drug use is that few studies have controlled for background characteristics that might confound an observed statistical association between medical specialty and substance use.…”

Improving the health of psychiatrists

“…This study and others (Myers & Weiss, 1987) also showed psychiatrists to have the highest rates of use of all substances, and psychiatry residents to have the highest lifetime use of cigarettes, cocaine, LSD, and marijuana compared with other specialties. Both male and female psychiatrists were over-represented in a study following medical members of Alcoholics Anonymous (Bissell & Jones, 1976;Bissell & Skorina, 1987), although this might be because psychiatrists are more willing to be open about their condition in a group setting.…”

Physician Impairment by Substance Abuse

“…[8] [9] In Bissell's [8] survey of 100 alcoholic women in medicine, few of the physicians were identified or helped by their colleagues despite displaying behavioral clues that suggested alcoholism. The conspiracy of silence by colleagues who ignore clues to impairment in a physician is present in all groups, including academic physicians.…”