How We Make This:

We start by paying attention to what residents are actually saying online—real posts from Reddit and the other corners of the internet where people vent, ask for help, and tell the truth. AI helps us sift through the mess and spot the themes across 12 articles reviewed this week. Then a human editor makes the judgment call on what’s worth carrying forward into this piece.

Your eyes feel gritty after eight hours staring at Epic. You’ve been meaning to schedule a dental cleaning for fourteen months. You showed up last week with a fever because calling out would dump your patients on a co-resident who’s already running on fumes. You’re a physician with residency survival skills that let you manage everyone else’s health problems but your own.

This isn’t a wellness lecture. It’s a practical guide to the occupational health, benefits, and self-care infrastructure that exists around you—and that residency never actually teaches you to use.

The EHR Is Destroying Your Eyes (And What to Do About It)

If you’ve got dry, gritty, itchy eyes after months of twelve-hour EHR days, you’re not imagining it. You’re not alone, either. A drop in blink rate during screen time, hospital HVAC, and the mental load that keeps you staring without a break brew a perfect storm for ocular surface disease.

Start with the basics: the 20-20-20 rule (every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds) sounds trivial, but it works when you actually do it. Set a silent vibrating reminder on your phone if you have to. Preservative-free artificial tears—not the ones with vasoconstrictors—should live in your white coat pocket. Use them prophylactically, not just when your eyes are already screaming.

Adjust your workstation. Epic’s default font and contrast settings aren’t optimized for your eyes. Increase font size, reduce screen brightness to match ambient lighting, and if you’re on a workstation-on-wheels, position the screen slightly below eye level to reduce lid retraction. Your GME office can request ergonomic accommodations—an external monitor, a keyboard tray, a chair that doesn’t destroy your lumbar spine—if you ask. Most residents don’t ask.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: persistent symptoms that don’t improve with lubrication or breaks aren’t just a nuisance. They point to a bigger issue with how we structure shifts, screen time, and rest.

What happens when the next shift ends and the screen glare finds you again? The only thing certain is you’ll have to choose what happens next.

P.S. PhysEmp has job opportunities and salary reports by specialty — handy now, essential once the job hunt kicks off: physemp.com. And DocCommons is building an actual community for residents and attendings who’d rather not go it alone; the waitlist is open: doccommons.com