ABSTRACT
Divorce rates among doctors vary according to specialty. While the everyday stresses of a physician’s life may not contribute to the divorce rate all that much, a lawsuit can change that dramatically. Emotional detachment is a problem for everybody, including physicians. In the presence of a more balanced life, Dr. Anupam Jena and Dr. Dan Ly investigated the divorce among physicians, and they found, surprisingly, that doctors have one of the lowest rates of divorce among health care professionals. Physicians who scored in the highest quarter on a test measuring anger had a 44% incidence of divorce compared with 27% for the rest of the study group. While women physicians had a higher absolute incidence of divorce, after adjusting for other factors, such as specialty, female physicians had the same risk of divorce as male physicians.
