Approximately 87 percent of midlife women with menopause symptoms did not seek medical care for those symptoms. Among those who did, only 25 percent received treatment. This is not a niche problem. It is one of the clearest clinical opportunities in medicine right now.

You took time off. You slept. You did what people say is supposed to help. And when you came back, nothing had changed. If rest did not fix it, the problem may not be burnout. It may be something the research has only recently found language for.

The mean age at which physicians leave clinical practice has dropped from 57 to 48 in a single generation. That is not a trend. It is a structural collapse — and the data on why it is happening, especially for women physicians, is worth reading carefully.

She left a panel of nearly 2,000 patients to build a practice on her own terms. Then a medical mission trip to the Philippines sharpened everything she already knew about why access to care — and the way she delivers it — matters.