I knew that medical residency (that's the three to seven years doctors spend in training after four years of medical school) was rough, but I didn't realize how rough. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education just approved new national rules limiting residents to 80 hours a week.
So the medical slave laborer at the hospital, the one who is messing with people's bodies, selecting medicines, and entering vital statistics into record systems will be working only eighty hours a week?
``This will really require a revolution in the way residents' hours are structured,'' said Dr. Peter Herbert, chief of staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which was sanctioned by the council last month for overworking surgical residents.
At hospitals around the country, there are often no limits on the number of hours most medical residents can work in a week, though some specialties already impose 80-hour limits. Some doctors in training complain that they routinely toil more than 100 hours a week and are on call every other night.
Great, people come out of medical training with a hundred thousand dollars of debt and a zillion hours of sleep deprivation.
In another perspective on the situation,
A British study on sleep fatigue found that staying awake for 24 hours is like having a blood alcohol level of point one. That's above the legal limit for drunk driving in Illinois.
As an old codger who needs to take a nap every afternoon, I'm not in the same league as a young, bright, dedicated physician in training. On the other hand, back in my number-crunching days at the satellite factory, we noticed that after a couple of 60-hour overtime weeks, we tended to spend a significant part of every day correcting the mistakes made the night before. And no lives were at stake.
9:58:03 PM 
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