A recent national survey published in The Permanente Journal gives us the clearest look in more than a decade at why physicians are leaving clinical practice early. The findings, drawn from nearly 1,000 clinically inactive doctors who completed residency between 2000 and 2022, show a striking shift in when physicians are leaving practice. The mean age at departure is now 48.1, compared with 57.1 in a comparable cohort studied in 2008. In other words, physicians are leaving roughly nine years earlier than a generation ago.