A recent study published in The BMJ, was the biggest divorce rate investigation amongst physicians has shown that physicians are less likely to divorce that those in other occupations such as law, and also have a lower rate than other healthcare professionals such as nurses. The study also found that female physicians faced a higher likelihood of divorce than male counterparts, significantly due to their working longer hours. Senior author, and Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor (Healthcare Policy), Anupam Jena stated ‘It’s been speculated that doctors are more likely to be divorced than other professionals because of the long hours they keep and the stress associated with the job, but no large-scale study has ever been investigated whether that is true. We found that doctors have among the lowest rates of divorce among health care professionals. For those entering medicine who are concerned about how their career choice might impact their personal lives, our findings should be reassuring.’ Earlier studies covering smaller non-representative samples found a higher rate of divorce amongst physicians, and were published 30 or more years ago. The overall divorce rate in the US has since then dropped by over 25%. Jena and his colleagues also evaluated data from the American Community Survey, covering close to 3 million households and undertaken by the US Census Bureau. In this survey data, pharmacists were the only healthcare workers at 23% divorce rate that was less than physicians (24%). Dentists faced a 25% rate, executives 31%, and nurses 33%. The probability of lawyers for divorce was tallied at 27%. All non healthcare occupations had a 35% probability od divorce. Males had an opposite effect on increased hours of work and divorce rate as compared to females. Dan Ly, lead Author and Harvard Medical School clinical fellow (Mass General) stated ‘we believe that the higher incidence of divorce among female physicians stems from the greater tradeoffs they are forced to make to achieve work/life balance. More research is needed to understand whether that interpretation is indeed accurate, and if it is, what can be done to help with work/life balance.’