Physicians have one of the most stressful jobs imaginable. With the horrible hours and crazy stress that come with the job, you would think that the married ones' home lives would be full of anger and marital discord. However, according to a new survey, physician's relatively have it better than the rest of the healthcare world when it comes to happy marriages.
According to a study run in the journal The BMJ, the prevalence of divorce among physicians was 24.3%. By comparison, divorce prevalence was 25.2% among dentists, 22.9% among pharmacists, 33.0% among nurses, 30.9% among healthcare executives, and 26.9% among lawyers. The prevalence of divorce among other nonhealth-healthcare professionals was 35.0% .
The numbers come from an analysis of nationally representative surveys conducted by the US census between 2008 and 2013. Participants included 48,881 physicians, 10,086 dentists, 13,883 pharmacists, 159,044 nurses, 18,920 healthcare executives, 59,284 lawyers, and 6,339,310 other nonhealthcare professionals.
But that doesn't mean it's all peachy for the doctors in the love realm. When researchers analyzed the data based on gender, female physicians were found to be significantly more likely to have been divorced than their male peers. Among female physicians, the number of hours worked per week was also positively associated with the probability of ever being divorced, with female physicians working 40 to 49 hours a week having a 34% higher probability of ever being divorced compared with female physicians who worked less than 40 hours a week.
In contrast, male physicians who worked more than 40 hours a week had a 23% lower risk of ever being divorced than male physicians who worked less than 40 hours a week.
For more:
Divorce among doctors isn't as common as you think, study finds (Washington Post)
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