Blog #8 for HONO1397

 For this week’s class we dove into the deep end of the medical field and the coexistent matter of sleep within their perspective fields. We learned that because doctors, surgeons, and really anyone in the medical field are in an incredibly demanding field, they are required to be awake for many hours a week and sometimes go days without any sleep at all. Through one article, we were able to determine the dangers of being a doctor and compared it to that of a truck driver. 

Within a week, doctors work anywhere between 60 to 100 hours, and they are on call for almost all of those hours. There could be a shortage of doctors and maybe that is why they are required to stay awake for so long, but we know that even from the start of medical school students in training are put through vigorous shifts of no sleep to get their bodies used to that by the time they are out of residency. It is no wonder that it is extremely difficult to become a doctor or surgeon, and it also no surprise that many residents and/or surgeons themselves are beginning to become dissatisfied with their line of work. The work is intense, immense, and without little to any rest. And it has caused extreme sleep deprived individuals from across the board. The dangers of playing with one’s health, in this case sleep health on the side of doctors, causes faulty and unfortunately deadly causes unto others, in this case on the side of the patients that doctors are seeing or conducting surgery on.

Now we also learned how sleep is affected through the perspective of the patients in both the ICU and anyone that stays in the hospital overnight. They say sleep is the best medicine and it is not exception for individuals who are in critical condition. They need to be asleep the majority of the time there but they hardly get enough sleep since medical examiners come in throughout the day to check up on them. Sometimes, nurses or doctors don’t even come in for medical purposes but it wakes up the patients nonetheless which causes them to lose precious hours of sleep that can be the difference between a fully recovered and healed body and a partial one.