Dying for a kip: the importance of sleep medicine

Author: Currie, A., E. Peile, et al.

Website: http://student.bmj.com/issues/05/03/careers/106.php

Publisher: studentBMJ 2005;13:89-132 March ISSN 0966-6494

Journal: BMJ Career Focus 330(7486): 53-a-55.

Medical students get about two minutes teaching on it, and there are only a handful of dedicated consultants. Its time we woke up to the merits of sleep medicine say Andy Currie, Ed Peile, and Chris Hanning.

Sleep takes up one third of our lives and yet is one of the most poorly understood areas of human physiology. Animals starved of sleep are known to die in a few weeks, and people are no different. Falling asleep at the wheel of a car kills more people on the roads than any other cause, and sleep deprivation has been blamed for many public health emergencies, including the Challenger shuttle disaster and Chernobyl. Problems sleeping is one of the commonest reasons a patient will present to their doctor and yet sleep medicine receives hardly any coverage in the undergraduate curriculum.

 

 

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