Perspectives on Medical Interns’ Long Hours and Fatigue
Re: “Waking Up to the Problem of Fatigue Among Medical Interns” (April 16): When a normally intelligent person makes a totally ridiculous statement, I look for the hidden reasoning behind the statement. When the two doctors stated that fatigue did not lead to mistakes, my suspicions were aroused. The true reason that interns are overworked and sleep deprived is that the hospitals are greedy. The only way to stop this is for the victims of mistakes to sue and make it too expensive for the hospitals and their mouthpieces to keep lying.
ALEX MAGDALENO
Camarillo
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The arrogance expressed in Richard Reiling’s statement that surgeons “are built differently” and learn to become impervious to exhaustion is the reason such a high percentage of Americans consult alternative health practitioners. If doctors are so ignorant of how their own bodies work, how can they know how my body works? When doctors are trained to ignore their own body’s signals, how can they give credence to my complaints?
KAREN SMITH
La Canada Flintridge
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The issue of work hours among residents is a complex one, but like many things, it all comes down to money. With adequate funding for graduate medical education, the workload of residents could be significantly reduced by the hiring of physician extenders. Perhaps the private insurance and managed care industry could even assist in financing resident education rather than just reaping its benefits. Physician fatigue may well lead to errors, but sleep deprivation is also a method of torture, and we should no longer accept it.
Dr. GERALD GOLLIN
Associate Program Director
Surgery Residency Program
Loma Linda University
School of Medicine
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Like athletic training, surgical and medical residency programs must stress their residents beyond that normally experienced in daily practice. Only then will they be experienced enough to manage the uncommon diseases and be prepared enough to handle unforeseen stresses.
It may go against the Oath of Hippocrates I swore to uphold as I graduated medical school, but I hope that someday those who support the regulation of training programs find themselves on an operating room table, with their lives in the balance, staring up at a surgeon who never experienced what ails them because the surgeon was unable to work past his allotted hours and was absent when a similar case may have crossed his path.
Dr. PETER J. TAUB
Division of Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgery
UCLA School of Medicine
