29/12/2025
I’ve been thinking a lot about burnout in physical therapy, and I’m not convinced we’ve identified the real cause.
We usually blame pay, paperwork, empathy fatigue, patient volume, or insurance. Those things matter but I’m not sure they’re actually the biggest core factor.
Across most professions, a full workday doesn’t mean eight hours of sustained effort. Data consistently show that people average 4–5 hours per day of truly productive work, with the rest spent in meetings, communication, coordination, and mental downtime.
Physical therapy is different.
When you’re treating patients, you’re working—continuously. Engaging, cueing, problem-solving, documenting, answering questions, multitasking. There’s no low-cognitive buffer. No real downtime. If you work 40 hours, you actually work 40 hours—and often more once notes spill outside the day.
I think PT burnout isn’t primarily about volume or resilience. It’s about cognitive density.
Patient-facing care requires near-constant attention, decision-making, and emotional engagement. A 40-hour patient-facing week is not the same as a 40-hour desk job, even if it looks that way on paper.
Until we acknowledge that difference, we’ll keep talking past this. The question is how do we “fix” it.
