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Comment by parenteral | Hacker News Reader

I'm a doctor and I dispute this. I'm not advocating for long work hours or saying that it's healthy/OK. But the "worst students" in my assessment are people that I wouldn't trust to care for my loved ones at all and I would definitely take my weary-eyed trusted colleagues over the former any day. It's a very long discussion, but there are some really bad doctors out there who get by because most mistakes don't cause obvious harm.

Also, the body that oversees residency programs is going to relax duty-hours restrictions since they've studied it now and there's no difference in outcomes or resident satisfaction when they eliminate the 80-hour restriction.

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> no difference in outcomes...

I find it hard to believe there's no difference in outcomes. Every study related to quantity of sleep or sleep deprivation that doesn't have to do with doctors points to severe cognitive impairment as waking hours increase and sleeping hours decrease. It's incredibly suspicious that studies that are related to doctors point the other way, especially studies conducted by the body that oversees residency programs (sure, I expect them to be unbiased, right). Either patient outcomes are indeed affected by the long hours, or being a doctor is so comically easy that a drunk monkey could do it. I doubt it's the latter.

Speaking of drunkenness, being caught drunk on the job is a firing offense for a doctor, and I believe you can also lose your medical license, right? Sleep deprivation has been shown to affect judgment, alertness, memory, and reaction time in a similar manner as alcohol. If it's fine for a doctor to be sleep deprived, why not let them be drunk while working too?

> ... or resident satisfaction when they eliminate the 80-hour restriction.

Of course not. The residents would never complain, lest they risk being viewed as slackers.

> Speaking of drunkenness, being caught drunk on the job is a firing offense for a doctor, and I believe you can also lose your medical license, right? Sleep deprivation has been shown to affect judgment, alertness, memory, and reaction time in a similar manner as alcohol. If it's fine for a doctor to be sleep deprived, why not let them be drunk while working too?

Unfortunately, it's not just a rhetorical argument, but it is a true problem with hospital doctors: alcoholism, drunk at work, and of course abuse of all drugs that are easily available for them. And everyone covers it up, as long as there is not a major accident.

There are of course the same reasons as in the general population, but there are extra ones: the pressure; the stupid work organisation with stupidly long shifts; the fact that most of the medicine studies are also insanely organised and insanely competitive (in my country, this is where you find the shittiest mood and mentality of all studies, except perhaps a few business studies), thus the habit is taken early to use alcohol and drugs to "perform" or to "put up with the workload", except that it is 'fine' when you are young, but when you get older and keep the same habit, you don't recover and the effects accumulate.

The kind of doctors who are working 30 hours straight probably have a degree of difficulty level in what they're doing approaching the drunken monkey.

And sleep deprivation is a well-known torture technique.

That's even worse, you know. Not only you are working people to the brink of exahustion. You are failing to cull the idiots in your midst and then work those idiots to the brink of exahustion. What could possibly go wrong.

Also, I am not convinced that the study that found there's no difference in outcomes means what your overseeing board claims it means. As mentioned in the article, they have not measured the performance of individual workerd, but of the hospital as a whole. Most likely it just means that whoever happens to be better rested in the team is catching (and covering up) the fuckups of the ones that are most tired.

Working over 80 hours in a 7 day period is just insane in and of itself, unless there is a major crisis you shouldn't be working more than 40hrs a week.

People fought and died for an 8 hour workday, and here the AMA and hospitals are shitting all over it, putting everyone involved at risk. Should we bring back child labor while we're at it?

There are basically no children with enough experience to be doctors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doogie_Howser,_M.D.

Your counter example is a fictiona character? Or is this one of those joke things I keep hearing about?

Yes, it's one of those 'joke' things. Stay cool :)

Uh, why would residents report dissatisfaction when it would hurt their opportunities down the road? Would you have? I don't think so. I don't think you are being skeptical enough about these "studies".

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