[perilunar]

Medical residents do stupid work hours, and medicine is the one profession ought to know better. Pilots and truck drivers are legally restricted in the number of hours they can work, and doctors should be also. We know the effects of sleep deprivation, but doctors are 'special'.

There is no reason for it that I can see, apart from a general shortage of cheap, early-career doctors, due to their stupid guild-like methods of limiting inputs. That and their stupid machismo of proving themselves, as you say.

[prostoalex]

> William Halsted, the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins in the 1890s and a founder of modern medical training, required his residents to be on call 362 days a year (only later was it revealed that Halsted fueled his manic work ethic with cocaine), and for the next 100 years the attitude of the medical establishment was more or less the same.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-mena...