Every December, glossy magazines and lifestyle blogs publish their cheerful gift guides filled with candles, robes, gourmet chocolates, and oversized blankets. They promise rest, rejuvenation, and a warm cup of serenity. But if you ask an actual doctor what they want for the holidays, the answers aren’t usually scented, cozy, or neatly wrapped. They’re practical. Raw. Slightly sarcastic. And they reveal just how far the medical profession has drifted from anything resembling sustainable human functioning.
If physicians wrote their own holiday wish list (an honest one, not the polite version patients might imagine), it would read less like a catalog and more like a manifesto. A plea. A love letter to sanity. Maybe even a slightly exasperated cry for help. But it would also be funny, because if medicine teaches you anything, it’s how to laugh at the absurdity of the system that both breaks you and keeps you going.
At the top of that wish list? Fewer prior authorizations. Not zero, as that’s too unrealistic, even for fantasy. Just fewer. The average doctor today spends hours each week begging insurance companies to allow treatments they are trained to provide. It’s a ritual humiliation baked into the job, a kind of bureaucratic gauntlet you must run before delivering actual care. Imagine if, just for the month of December, prior auths took ten minutes instead of forty-five. Imagine hearing “approved” on the first try instead of after three denials and a peer-to-peer call with someone who hasn’t seen a patient in twelve years. That alone would feel like Christmas magic.
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Conny Huthsteiner, MD, a psychiatrist active in our SoMeDocs community, stated she wished for “more free time to step back and solve the bigger problems. Problems like: unnecessary administrative burdens; CVS sending automated requests for 90 d supplies every time I write a prescription; unnecessary re-credentialing over and over again.” She continued, “EOB’s that are 8 pages long for one medication (Medicare); EOB’s that are impossible for a layperson to understand; the feeling as if we are all being financially taken to the cleaners by the health insurance industry and hospital administrators. I wish we would find our personal and political power as professionals. There is no professional who is subjected to so much outside control as physicians. That is what I would wish for.”
Close behind that? Fewer portals. Not the good ones that help patients communicate, but the dozens of overlapping, glitchy windows doctors must navigate every day, each demanding logins, password resets, and unread message boxes that somehow multiply when no one is looking. A holiday miracle would be a single inbox. A single schedule. A single universe of tasks instead of the current “choose-your-own-overwhelm” landscape that turns every workday into an escape room with poor lighting.
Then, of course, there’s the wish for time. Real time. Not the seven-minute visit where you’re supposed to diagnose, treat, document, and offer emotional support while clicking through thirty-four checkboxes. Doctors want the kind of time that allows them to sit down, look a patient in the eye, and remember why they entered medicine in the first place. Time to think, to listen, to care, and not shovel through an avalanche of administrative requirements that bury the human parts of the job. If Santa could bring physicians an extra ten minutes per patient, the profession might experience something close to joy.
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Another wish, whispered but universal: fewer metrics. Physicians dream of a day when their worth isn’t measured by RVUs, throughput, or how many boxes they checked in the EMR. They fantasize about practicing medicine without feeling like data-generating machines. They wonder what it would feel like to have their value determined by clinical judgment, compassion, and outcomes, not by how efficiently they can sprint on a treadmill built by people who will never run on it themselves.
Right about now, the holiday list starts to get more tender. Doctors want kindness. A bit of grace. The acknowledgment that they are human beings working in an emotional minefield where the stakes are life and death, every single day. They want colleagues who check in, leaders who understand, and systems that don’t treat burnout as a personal failing. They want to be allowed to have bad days without triggering disciplinary whispers. They want room to be human without fearing judgment.
And speaking of humanity, physicians want the same thing they encourage in their patients: rest. Actual rest. The kind that doesn’t get interrupted by inbox messages or staffing emergencies or calls to cover an extra shift because someone else is sick. They want to remember what a weekend feels like. What a true vacation feels like. Many doctors don’t realize how exhausted they are until they stop moving, and then feel guilty for stopping. A doctor’s holiday wish list would absolutely include the radical permission to rest without apology.
Another wish, whispered but universal: fewer metrics. Physicians dream of a day when their worth isn’t measured by RVUs, throughput, or how many boxes they checked in the EMR.
“Salary that is actually commensurate with the value we bring, that of saving lives,” added Dr. Nanette Nuessle. “If we had that, primary care docs could actually afford vacations and retire on time.”
What else might show up? Fewer meetings. Fewer consultants who disagree only to later agree. Fewer “quick questions” that siphon an hour of your life. Fewer system updates that roll out at 4 a.m. on a Monday and break every workflow until February. Fewer leadership memos about “self-care” that seem to be written by people who haven’t had a full lunch break in seventeen years.
And yet, nestled among the sarcasm and frustration, there would also be wishes that reflect the optimism that still lives in medicine. Doctors want hope. They want to see a brighter version of healthcare, which that values connection over volume, care over coding, purpose over productivity. They want to feel proud of their work again, not because of RVUs but because they made someone’s life a little better. They want to believe the system can evolve. They want the joy of medicine back, even if just in flickers.
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Most of all, doctors want what everyone wants during the holidays: to feel like what they do matters. To feel seen. To feel supported instead of stretched. To feel like they’re part of something meaningful, not trapped inside something merciless.
If that showed up under a tree, in a stocking, on a card, or tucked quietly into a new year’s promise, it would be the most precious gift a doctor could receive.
Because when you strip away the exhaustion, the paperwork, the dashboards, the metrics, and the madness, you’re left with a profession full of people who still care deeply. Who still want to help. Who still show up despite everything the system throws at them.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s the real holiday miracle in medicine.
Many doctors don’t realize how exhausted they are until they stop moving, and then feel guilty for stopping.
