White Supremacy Culture and the Assimilation Trauma of Medical Training: Ungaslighting the Physician Burnout Discourse

The physician burnout discourse emphasizes organizational challenges and personal wellbeing as primary points of intervention. However, these foci have minimally impacted this worsening public health crisis by failing to address the primary sources of harm: oppression. Organized medicine’s whiteness, developed and sustained since the 19th century, has molded training and clinical practice, favoring those who embody its oppressive ideals while punishing those who do not. Here, we reframe physician burnout as the trauma resulting from the forced assimilation into whiteness and the white supremacy culture embedded in medical training’s hidden curriculum. We argue that “ungaslighting” the physician burnout discourse requires exposing the history giving rise to medicine’s whiteness and related white supremacy culture, rejecting discourses obscuring their harm, and utilizing bold and radical frameworks to reimagine and transform medical training and practice into a reflective, healing process.