Welcome to The Happiest Hell on Earth

(Where Diversity Wins Awards and Dissent Gets You a Gag Order)

They love their awards.

Best Employer.

Champion of Diversity.

Physician Well-Being Program of the Year.

All printed on glossy posters, blasted on LinkedIn, looping on the lobby TV next to the fake plants.

And yet… behind the trophy case? The most toxic workplace I’ve ever stepped foot in.

⸻

The PR version:

• A “Be Well” program full of burnout prevention tips and stock photos of smiling doctors in soft lighting.

• Annual tributes to how much they value our voices.

• Speeches about diversity dripping with buzzwords.

The reality version:

• White, non-clinical female administrators — one with no college degree, résumé boasting a year at Whole Foods and a year at Chick-fil-A — telling a triple board-certified Black physician to “stay in your place” and “watch your tone.”

• A rule that I, and only I, could not speak directly to staff.

• Scheduling sabotage that made patient care unsafe.

• Racial undertones so thick you could carve them with a scalpel.

⸻

I asked for a safe place to work.

I asked for accommodations.

I asked for the chance to keep practicing medicine without burning to the ground.

They gave me:

• Short-term disability denial

• Workers’ comp denial

• Permanent leave dressed up as “process”

• And even from home — unpaid and emotionally traumatized — attempts to control my voice.

Because here’s the thing: you can plaster “We care about our physicians” all over your website, but the real measure is how you treat the ones who dare to speak up.

If awards were given for gaslighting, retaliation, and racialized silencing?

They’d have a shelf full of those too.