Antidote for Burnout: Sanjana Karim, MD
“Ever since I began praying before I go into each patient’s room,” Sanjana Karim, MD told me, “I have not suffered from burnout.”
Did Karim really have the magic pill for physician burnout which, according to several studies, is at an all-time high?
I circle back to talk with the Georgetown-trained psychiatrist and owner of Peace Tree Mental Health in San Francisco, Calif., to find out.
There is something completely direct, unassuming and fiercely gentle about Karim’s expression.
The hijab that frames her face renders her expression courageous, too.
I soon learn that, for Karim, the answer is Yes: Her faith is like a deep river running beneath her calm, kind exterior from which she draws strength for each and every patient.
Yes, the system is broken, she admits. Yes, medicine is in crisis.
“[But] it’s going to be hard for any broken system to break you if you have your purpose,” says Karim, who combines psychiatry and therapy. “It’s not what you do. It’s ‘What’s your purpose? How does medicine align with that purpose?’”
This clarity of purpose wasn’t always the case, says Karim, whose parents and grandfather were also physicians.
“I used to look at work as one thing, being a mother as another thing, and prayer as another thing,” says Karim, who was born in Bangladesh.
But at the age of 40, when Islam says one comes of age, she began to more seriously study her Islamic faith and integrate all aspects of her life.
Faith now connects Karim’s role as a mother, wife and physician.
One of her earliest role models in this sort of faithful integration was her attending at a state hospital in Virginia when she was a resident.
One night, the police brought in a psychotic man. He was mumbling to himself and she could barely stand his acrid smell. He couldn’t look her in the eye. Karim, who was charged with getting his history.
The patient was incoherent, mumbling and his smell was unbearable.
“I really couldn’t get any history from him…I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do my due diligence and then get out of this room. We’ll clean him up, give him the medications and he’ll be fine,” recalls Karin,
Not long after her attempt, Karim saw her attending sitting on the hallway floor, “next to this really smelly man, leaning really close to him. He’s nodding as the man mumbled, saying, ‘Tell me about that, tell me about that.’”
The attending got the man’s complete history.
Deeply moved, Karim went to her mentor and asked: “How do you have so much energy? How do you do this? How do you not become exhausted?”
“‘I do it for the love of God. It’s driven by love,’” Karim recalls him saying. “‘You have to be driven by love for your patients. When you do it for the sake of God, you love people unconditionally,’ I wasn’t expecting this, because we don’t talk about [faith] in medicine.”
These days, Karim’s medical practice — like all areas of her life — provides daily opportunities for ritualized religious practice.
This includes praying for each patient before she begins a session, says Karim, who particularly loves working with addiction. It is there that she witnesses some of most powerful tenants of her religious faith: surrender and submission.
Karim’s faith also keeps her ego in check. “Every time I get really full of myself, it’s the very idea that I’m not God. Whatever benefit I give people or whatever benefit they’re able to get from me is because God enabled me.”
She believes that healing happens when patient and physician work together, with God’s help.
It’s not all up to her. She is not God, after all. “It’s important to empty it. It’s realizing I am nothing,” she says.
Karim says she does not need to push anything toward her patients, only 10 percent of whom are Muslim.
“If you know I love you, that I deeply care about you, that I’m invested, people feel that,” she says.
Love is the ultimate fuel for her work.
It is the key to not only powerful healing for her patients. But love is also the antidote to her own exhaustion in today’s deeply troubled medical system.
What’s your cure for burnout?