June is Men’s Health Month, a time to encourage men to prioritise screenings, pay attention to symptoms, and take their health seriously. This year’s theme, partners in care, highlights something overlooked in that conversation: men don’t manage their health in isolation. The families, colleagues, communities, and care systems around them play a factor in whether they thrive or quietly decline. That dynamic is especially true in medicine, where the people best positioned to support a physician’s health are often the same ones depending on him to show up. Yet, there’s a group that spends their entire careers telling patients to prioritise their health while neglecting to do it themselves.
The Physician Who Skips His Own Appointment
It’s a well-documented irony in medicine: physicians are the least likely adults to have a primary care provider. Studies consistently show that doctors delay seeking care, avoid addressing symptoms, and are less likely than their patients to follow through on preventive screenings. The reasons are familiar to anyone who has worked in a demanding clinical environment: not enough time, a sense that it can wait, the assumption that being a physician means knowing how to manage things yourself.
For male physicians specifically, those tendencies are compounded by the cultural expectations that have historically surrounded men and vulnerability. Asking for help can feel at odds with the professional identity that training reinforces over the years.
Burnout Is Down. It’s Not Over.
The overall burnout rate among physicians has trended downward in recent years. According to AMA’s most recent data, nearly 42% of physicians reported at least one burnout symptom in 2025, down from 48% in 2023. That progress is worth acknowledging, but nearly half of all physicians experiencing a form of burnout is not a success story. It’s a baseline that medicine has quietly normalised. And the data reveals a more nuanced picture for male physicians specifically. While men report burnout at lower rates than women (46% vs. 56% in recent Medscape data), they are significantly less likely to reach out to a colleague they suspect is struggling. Only 25% of male physicians reported checking in on a peer they believed was experiencing mental health distress, compared to 40% of female physicians. The gap isn’t just about individual health. It reflects a broader cultural hesitance that runs deep in medicine.
There’s also the stigma factor. More than 73% of physicians agree there is a stigma surrounding mental health and seeking care in the profession. Nearly 38% reported either being afraid or knowing a colleague who was afraid to seek mental health care because of questions that appear in licensure and credentialing applications. For men in medicine, who are already less likely to seek help in the general population, that stigma creates a significant barrier.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Physician well-being doesn’t always look like a crisis. More often, it looks like skipping lunch for the fourth day in a row, not sleeping well, but assuming that’s just how it is, not having seen a doctor in two years, because scheduling an appointment for yourself feels like something to get to eventually. It looks like being good at caring for everyone else, while the basic maintenance of your own health gets indefinitely postponed.
For physicians in rural and underserved settings, many of whom are doing the work of two or three providers, the demands are even more acute. The communities they serve often have limited access to the same specialists they would recommend to their own patients. The expectation to always be available, always stable, rarely leaves space to acknowledge when something is off.
Locum Tenens and the Autonomy to Prioritise Yourself
One thing that comes up consistently when physicians talk about what drew them to locum tensns is autonomy: specifically, the ability to shape a schedule that doesn’t consume everything else. Physicians practising as locums have more control over when they work, the ability to take intentional time off between assignments, and the flexibility to structure their professional lives in a way that leaves room for the rest of it.
That’s not a small thing for someone who has spent years in a system that treats availability as a virtue. For male physicians in particular, who may not naturally reach for support structures on their own, having structural flexibility built into how they practice can make the difference between burnout quietly accumulating and having room to address it.
This Men’s Health Month, the message for male physicians is: schedule the appointment you’ve been putting off. Consider whether your current practice environment gives you the space to sustain yourself. And if the answer is no, it’s worth exploring whether there’s a model that fits better.
The physicians who stay in healthcare for the long term are not the ones who pushed through everything; they figured out how to take care of themselves while caring for everyone else.
We work with physicians who are looking for short and long-term locum opportunities that fit their lives, including the parts of life that matter beyond the clinic. If you’re exploring what flexible practice could look like for you, search our current openings or reach out to our team.