<story><title>75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)</title><url>http://www.idealmedicalcare.org/75-med-students-antidepressants-stimulants/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>travisoneill1</author><text>Of course they all use stimulants.  I don&amp;#x27;t know how else they could handle the workload.  The scary part is that it continues into residency.  There are surgery residents working 24h+ shifts.  We have laws against overworking truck drivers, but somehow the medical profession gets a pass.&lt;p&gt;And Johns Hopkins estimates 250K deaths a year from medical errors.  I wonder how many of these are from lack of sleep.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;leahbinder&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;ignored-as-an-election-issue-deaths-from-medical-errors-have-researchers-alarmed&amp;#x2F;#2a778350653d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;leahbinder&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;ignored-a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>A friend runs a residency program and I&amp;#x27;ve talked with them about it a few times. This is definitely getting better, but the number of hours still seems high to me. As a developer, I&amp;#x27;m strongly against extended hours because I know how quickly the error rate creeps up. (And I probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t know that if I weren&amp;#x27;t doing TDD and pair programming, because the first thing that goes for me is ability to notice my poor performance.) My basic question was: shouldn&amp;#x27;t doctors work 8 hours and then go home?&lt;p&gt;The big difference between writing code and doing medicine is that patients won&amp;#x27;t stay the same when a doctor leaves for the day. With 8-hour shifts and 40-hour weeks, covering a patient around the clock requires 4-5 people. Those people will have 21 handoffs during that week. Each one of those handoffs is an opportunity for information to get lost, for understanding to fade, for followups not to happen. If people work 12 hours, that&amp;#x27;s only 4 handoffs. 16 and it&amp;#x27;s 10. 24 and it&amp;#x27;s 7.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, at some point the harm from overwork outweighs the harm from handoffs. But it&amp;#x27;s not an easy decision to make. When I&amp;#x27;m debugging some weird, urgent problem, I know how valuable it is to stay with it, to keep all the state loaded in my head until I figure it out. And hospitals are full of weird, urgent problems.</text></comment>
<story><title>75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)</title><url>http://www.idealmedicalcare.org/75-med-students-antidepressants-stimulants/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>travisoneill1</author><text>Of course they all use stimulants.  I don&amp;#x27;t know how else they could handle the workload.  The scary part is that it continues into residency.  There are surgery residents working 24h+ shifts.  We have laws against overworking truck drivers, but somehow the medical profession gets a pass.&lt;p&gt;And Johns Hopkins estimates 250K deaths a year from medical errors.  I wonder how many of these are from lack of sleep.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;leahbinder&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;ignored-as-an-election-issue-deaths-from-medical-errors-have-researchers-alarmed&amp;#x2F;#2a778350653d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.forbes.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;leahbinder&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;ignored-a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philip1209</author><text>The book &amp;quot;Why we sleep&amp;quot; talks a lot about this - apparently the doctor who created the first residency program was a cocaine addict, which let him stay awake for days at a time: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;William_Stewart_Halsted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;William_Stewart_Halsted&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>