The 36-hour shift
I was reading the paper this morning over my tea and crumpets when this headline caught my attention:
“First-year doctors would be allowed to work 24-hour shifts under new rules”
An old picture of me
Now there’s a topic near to my heart, so I decided without much forethought to subject you to my ramblings about physician training and the unbelievably long work hours that our society subjects physicians to all the time. But you may be surprised about what my conclusions are on the topic.
For those of you who read my last post Insomnia Part 1 and are looking for Insomnia Part 2, please bear with me because that second part is coming next week, complete with more insights from Samantha Anders, sleep expert from the Sleep Center at HCMC. I’m hoping to get some video interviewing done with Dr. Anders about behavioral therapy for insomnia, so stay tuned for that.
Why should you care about work rules for doctors-in-training?
That headline was from a Washington Post article covering the a proposed relaxation of work-hour restrictions for interns in hospitals. So here are some stories from my own experience about the rigors of medical training. Hopefully you’ll find something in here to get you thinking. read more…
Insomnia Part 1: Maybe you should just count sheep.
By John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA
I think I may hold the world record for the fastest time in falling asleep. Usually I’m out about a nanosecond after my head hits the pillow. And that’s just at night. I’m pretty good at falling asleep just about anywhere during the day as well. I think it’s a relic from my medical training days where the ability to sleep anywhere at anytime comes in really handy.
So falling asleep? No problem for me.
But every now and then, somewhere around 2 or 3:00 in the middle of the night, I wake up. And when this happens, I almost immediately start thinking about a zillion different thoughts. Last week when I inexplicably woke up at 3:00 a.m., I started thinking about a creepy discovery that my wife and I had made earlier in the day. It involved rodents, birdseed, and a crack in our house’s foundation. So my mind was racing, lying in bed in the middle of the night, and nothing I could do helped me get back to sleep.
I seriously considered counting sheep until I realized that the specifics of how one actually counts sheep while lying in bed are not apparent to me. Do you envision sheep leaping over a fence like in a cartoon? Or do the sheep pass in front of you in a single file line? Perhaps there is an audio component and you count the “baa” sounds.
Does anybody really know how to count sheep to help insomnia? I’m desperate here. So let’s turn elsewhere for some tips on sleep.
In this post you will find:
- Two short videos about insomnia.
- Links to insomnia resources.
- Some background about the types of insomnia.
- Practical tips to help you sleep.
Burns 1-2-3
Hey hey we are going to talk about burn injuries to your skin in this post. It’s a follow-up to the radio broadcast of last week where I talked with a burn surgeon. We learned some really important information about what to do when you or a loved one gets burned and we picked up cool lesser known (at least to me) factoids about burns and your skin.
Factoid: Your skin is the largest organ in your body. OK, maybe you knew that one already.
Read on to learn more about:
- Most common causes of burn injuries in children and adults, including a short video of some knuckleheaded guys.
- The classification of burns – that 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree business.
- First aid for burns. What to do if you get burned. And what not to do.
- An insider look at a modern Burn Unit, complete with a slick video.
