But few have written about the product’s voice. Spot an incorrect diagnosis on a patient’s list of medical problems? Good luck deleting it. Much easier to “resolve” it — a word choice that suggests an expectation of unmitigated success, as if Epic were your helicopter parent.

Checking in on a beloved patient who was hospitalized? Enter his chart and an accusatory pop-up may appear: “Deceased Patient Warning: You are entering the medical record of a deceased patient. Are you sure you want to proceed?” This can be a jarring way to hear the news. But Epic offers no condolences, no empathy, no acknowledgment that doctors, too, have beating hearts.

Who is Epic? I try to imagine. Perhaps a clean-shaven man who wears square-toed shoes and ill-fitting business suits. He follows the stock market. He uses a PC. He watches crime dramas. He never bends the rules. He lives in a condominium and serves on the board of directors. He rolls his shirts into tubes and arranges them by color in his drawers.

When you bring cookies to work, he politely declines because he is on a keto diet. He sails.

And he doesn’t know his audience.

Medicine, with its academic hurdles and rigid professional hierarchy, tends to attract people like me, motivated by compassion and a love of medical science, but also a desire for external validation. Doctors love ivory towers, honor societies and prestigious awards. But we’re also cruel to ourselves and feel a deep sense of anguish — even failure — when we make mistakes or are admonished by superiors.

Some have asked why doctors haven’t organized, why we haven’t raged against the system that has left us underslept, overstretched, chained to our computers — pushed to the edge of sanity in a frenetic system that values throughput and profit over physician well-being and authentic human connection.

Here is one answer: We have no idea how. We are about as rebellious as a church group.

Instead, we turn our anger inward. Medicine’s culture of perfectionism can sometimes border on self-flagellation, self-sacrifice, even martyrdom. It’s widely known that doctors suffer from disproportionately high rates of burnout, depression and suicide.