TWITTER – The social media giant was abuzz today when news broke that John Roberts, a primary care physician from Sioux Falls, SD, had won the much anticipated “KevinMD Big Burnout Sweepstakes.” Dr. Roberts won the grand prize by writing the 10,000th article on physician burnout published on KevinMD’s popular blog.
“I really can’t believe I won! I’m so excited!” Roberts said. “I mean, inside my soul has been viciously crushed by the painful reality of my meaningless existence, but seriously! I’m pumped!”
The sweepstakes, which was sponsored by Pfizer and Zoloft, was announced by KevinMD several weeks ago when the number of burnout articles rounded the 9,000 mark. When asked to comment on how they came up with the idea, KevinMD told Gomerblog, “Burnout is a huge problem in our profession. We realized months ago that every physician experiences burnout and every single one of those burned out physician voices needed to be heard. So We personally visited every physician within 1200 miles of Boston and had them write a burnout essay for the blog. Some didn’t want to write one, but that’s only because they were burned out. With a little bit of encouragement and a little bit of blocking the door until they wrote something, we ended up with 10,000 unique, beautifully written articles on burnout.”
Critics of KevinMD’s trademarked “Burnout Bonanza” claim that many of the blog posts on burnout lack substance. There may be some truth to that as one post published in April 2015 under the pseudonym “Dr. Burnout” was just the word “Burnout” written over 500 times. That particular post was shared over 30,000 times on social media.
Some physicians were so burned out, they published multiple articles chronicling their painful burnout experiences. In fact, John Roberts had published 12 prior burnout articles before hitting it big with his sweepstakes-winning post, titled “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.”
There was some concern from the burned-out physician community that publishing so much about burnout was causing physicians to be burned out by burnout, a condition known as “Meta Burnout” as described by KevinMD in a recent blog post.
When asked what he will do with the sweepstakes money, Roberts responded, “I’ll go to my bank, withdraw the money in hundred dollar bills, rest my stethoscope on that big pile of cash, and take hundreds of stock photos for my upcoming KevinMD blog posts.”
