Hospitals are chalk-full of surgeons, doctors, and nurses that are all overworked, burned out, and half-awake.
While I do not have the statistics, I would imagine sleep deprivation is a frequent cause of a lot of medical mistakes.
A friend, who switched from electrical engineering to medicine, told me that the medical residency program in the US was essentially molded by a doctor who was a cocaine addict; seemingly a lot of his students were, too. Maybe it’s a lot easier to work ridiculously long hours when you’re hopped up on coke.
The (admittedly limited) looking I did into the topic suggests that there’s at least a kernel of truth to that story — if not more.
You can look for yourself: the doctor’s name was William Stewart Halsted.
Tongue-in-cheek, but maybe the ADHD medications that doctors and academics often abuse today aren’t as efficacious as good old fashioned cocaine in keeping people working for 80+ hours a week.
To be fair, I don’t think cocaine was illegal during Halsted’s time, though he was in and out of treatment for that and, later, morphine addiction.
Well, I have ADHD and take those meds. They can absolutely work like cocaine in that regard, but I have never intentionally used them like that. Those meds would have to be used very judiciously because tolerance would mitigate that effect quiet quickly.
One thing that I wasn’t aware of until I happened upon a blurb somewhere is that Adderall is harder to get in many other countries than in the US (and seemingly impossible/illegal in a few).
This is so true. It is unbelievable how much pressure they are in constantly. This is a high risk for all patients and I don't agree that medical providers are paid enough for the amount of pressure they are under.
I truly think that the corporation structure sucking up money into executives, admins and shareholders needs to be cut down. The share of revenue for "corporation" needs to be much much much lower than share of revenue for actual providers.
Truck drivers have similarly high responsibilities. But it is private industry, and there are strict regulations to prevent tiredness.
If trucking would be state operated, we would get 30 hour driving shifts again!
The reason pilots in the US have very stringent well-followed rules around flight hours and fatigue has more to do with federal regulations being enforced stringently by the FAA. Which is pretty strong evidence that your assertion is baseless. If trucking had a regulator half as strong as the FAA you'd see similar rules around fatigue.
Part of the problem with trucking is more a race to the bottom in the commodity service of moving something from point A to point B. When your pay is directly tied to mileage or to shipment contracts then of course working longer hours produces more mileage or more contracts. Federal regulation actually counteracts this perverse incentive.
If anything medicine in the US needs more regulation of insurance companies and private equity owners of hospital systems. Those are the people who don't want to spend the money to hire enough nurses and hospital staff for every shift. If they raised wages for nursing staff and opened up more nursing schools the shortages would go away.
There are a limited number of seats in medical schools. The medical schools cannot limit these seats themselves, only the authority of the government makes that possible. Given that there is a direct relationship between the number of medical students and the number of future physicians/surgeons, and that there is a direct relationship between the number of physicians and the available physician man-hours, it must be true that government is limiting the number of physician man-hours for hospitals and other medical treatment venues.
If they wanted to increase the supply of the latter, they know or should know how to accomplish that.
Pretending that this is a private industry because there's some thin veneer of privatization is a little weird.
Because you can only see this through the lens of your own politics, you end up very confused. Leverage might make things better for those doctors... but we're not talking about that. We're talking about making things better for the public. A greater supply of doctor hours are needed... no more can be squeezed out of the existing supply of doctors (not even if you paid them more). You start talking about this topic or thinking about it, and your brain goes immediately into the "oh noes, those poor doctors, they need more leverage or something, maybe they need a union!". All I see is that they are overworked because we have a very limited supply of man-hours.
Truly, can you even force your mind to go to a place where you can think about how we might not overwork doctors? Do we just need to use medical treatment less? All those sick people are just greedy, but the doctors have to work 30 hour shifts during residency because they're shackled to the door handles or something?
> If anything the hospitals would be able to demand even more from their staff.
Yes, this would be true to some extent. But that's not the topic of conversation. It's not "how can we arrange these details so that doctors are compensated even more highly than they are now". It's literally "how can we arrange details do doctors aren't working 100 hours a week and killing people when they're falling asleep standing up". You've confused the two things, and you can't even tell. It's bizarre. I live in a world filled with p-zombies, I swear.
Preventing overlong shifts and too many work-hours per week requires regulation. "The market" cannot provide this, unless there would be a miracle of medical staff unionizing to a great degree.
And, in the grand scheme of things, hiring two doctors for 40 hours per week instead of one doctor for 80 hours a week does not change any bottom line. If they pursue the latter over the former, it is because finding any doctors at all to cover shifts is difficult... doctors are in short supply. By design.
I considered this, it just didn't matter.
> In that scenario increasing the number of medical doctors does not help to improve the working situation for them
Again with this nonsense. That wasn't what we were discussing. We didn't start off with "how can we make overworked Indian pilots' lives better". And we didn't end up in "how can we make overworked US medical doctors' lives better".
If there were a solution that made things safer (in either situation) while making the lives of those workers worse somehow, it would be worth discussing because their job performance affects many lives beyond their own.
> Preventing overlong shifts and too many work-hours per week requires regulation.
This is naive at best, but it's probably unintelligent. For essential work, where there is a small supply of workers qualified to perform the work, making sure that people don't work overlong shifts and endanger the public *actually requires expanding the pool of workers qualified to perform the work*. Unless, somehow, you think the supply is adequate and people with $300,000 in medical school debt have just decided to sit things out and do Uber because the hospital's too stressful. Do you somehow believe that? What evidence led you to believing that? Is your comprehension of economics so flimsy that you just assume that all supply of qualified, highly skilled workers in effectively infinite or at least indefinite in quantity?
I feel like I'm talking to a spider monkey or maybe a marmot or something. How is this not obvious to you? What cognitive defect do you suffer from?
I am also sleep deprived too. ;)
It is “chock full” btw
The long hours themselves aren't the goal, they're a side effect of the artificial barriers put up intended to keep pay high.
Do you have more information on this?
Not my field, but I have a hard time believing surgeons and doctors want to work to the point of burnout.
I did try and find information myself first, googling for things like “Surgeons lobby for longer hours” and “Surgeons lobby for more work” and am not seeing anything remotely like your claim.