The paperwork and the inspections wore her down more than the patients did A Chinese doctor who spent 20 years in medicine has left it to run a steamed bun shop. The work is harder but the pressure is gone.
Dong Min, 48, graduated from Wuhan University’s medical school in 1999. She worked as a gynaecologist in Shenzhen for years before moving to Wuhan to help her mother run a private clinic there.
They closed the clinic when her mother retired and [her mother / they both] moved back to Tianmen, the family’s home city elsewhere in Hubei. Dong then returned to medicine at a small community hospital in [เมือง], where she was also the legal representative.
That last part is what she found hardest. As a doctor she faced heavy mental stress, she says, and had to spend energy on matters that had nothing to do with treating anyone.
Frequent inspections by government agencies were part of it, she says. Relations between hospitals and patients in China are known to be tense. As legal representative she carried full responsibility for any dispute.
She thought about leaving several times. In 2013 she grew interested in the bun trade through a friend whose family ran a shop.
At first she only put money into a shop of her own. When the cook quit without warning she had to learn to make the buns herself, picked it up quickly and found she enjoyed it.
Her family objected when she left medicine, because the profession carries standing that a bun shop does not. She was almost 50 and had seen enough not to mind what people thought, she says.
Her mother and brother came round in time and now help at the shop. The business opened in Wuhan in 2023, and a second branch followed in July.
She works more than 10 hours a day and says none of it weighs on her mind. Life has no fixed answer and it is never too late to change, she says. She wants to keep going until she cannot manage it.
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Source
The story Chinese doctor leaves medicine after 20 years to sell steamed buns in Wuhan as seen on Thaiger News.
