About this ebook
In Burning at Both Ends, Jonathan D. Block, MD, MBA, MLS, MPH, CPE, delivers a blunt, physician-to-physician autopsy of the modern healthcare system. If you are a doctor who is exhausted, angry, or quietly wondering whether you can keep practicing medicine as it currently exists, this is your guide to reclamation.
Dr. Block rejects the industry-standard wellness narrative, reframing burnout not as a personal failure of grit, but as a rational response to corporate capture, private equity extraction, administrative overload, moral injury, and a culture that has spent decades confusing sacrifice with excellence.
Stop Coping and Start Deciding
This is not another book about mindfulness or practicing gratitude to survive an impossible schedule. It is a direct, clear-eyed guide designed to help physicians name the forces working against them and think honestly about what comes next.
Through 24 incisive chapters, you will explore:
The Maslach Triad: Understanding emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and the loss of personal accomplishment.
Institutional Gaslighting: Why resilience training often shifts the burden of systemic failure onto the individual physician.
Moral Injury: The psychological weight of being forced to compromise professional values for administrative metrics.
Financial Sovereignty: Calculating the runway needed to gain leverage and say no to predatory contracts.
The Four-Path Triage Model: A framework to help you stay and repair, shrink your exposure, move laterally, or exit clinical medicine entirely.
Whether you are three years into your first attending job or a veteran clinician running the sunk-cost math on your entire career, this book helps you decouple your identity from the system and reclaim your life on your own terms.
Your degree belongs to you. It is time to start acting like it.
Reclaim your agency and redefine your future in medicine. Get your copy of Burning at Both Ends today.
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About the author
Jonathan D. Block, MD, MBA, MLS, MPH, CPE is a physician, executive, consultant, and founder of Pierhead Lighthouse, a healthcare coaching and consulting firm focused on helping clinicians, companies, and medical organizations think clearly under pressure. A practicing urologist and obesity medicine specialist by training, he has spent his career inside the realities this book describes: the clinical demands, administrative burden, professional identity traps, financial pressures, and moral strain that define modern medicine.
Dr. Block’s work spans clinical practice, physician coaching, healthcare strategy, biotech and medical device consulting and market adoption analysis. Across those roles, he has advised physicians and healthcare organizations on how systems shape behavior, how professional incentives can quietly distort judgment, and how highly trained clinicians can reclaim agency before burnout becomes collapse.
