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"Rather than having one intern working 120 hours per week, wouldn’t it make more sense to have two interns working 60 hours per week each?"

From personal experience, NO. That intern saved my life.

In regards to your statement "The rate of iatrogenic complications suggests there are a lot of doctors making mistakes they might not be making if they were wide-awake."

No. I do not believe that is the cause. The cause is doctors, having to see more patients due to decreased prices and ambulance chasing attorneys....thanks medicaid, government and all illegals!

There are ALWAYS complications that can occur in surgery, as well as being put under.

Back then, they didn't have the technology they have now. Due to my blood tests, my count was lowering. The 2nd doctor, who performed the surgery, said it could be due to the poison from the cyst, or I was bleeding internally. They would have to cut me open to determine which it was.

I consented to the exploratory surgery, thank the good Lord!

Control of resident working hours was already evolving in that direction — localities and the free market would have fixed any problems just fine, but instead fascists took over that decision making process.

You keep ragging on this issue like it’s new thinking that sometimes residents get too tired to be as safe as if they were more rested. Of course can be problems if people are too tired. There are ALSO problems when patients get handed back and forth and the doctors spend all their time and energy trying to re-acquire and re-memorize that the hell is going on with patients when they have to “change shifts” like a dang union job. Now you are seeing that. HOURS and HOURS of notes and hand-off conferences to pass patients around, all fertile ground for MORE and NEW mistakes. The law of unintended consequences HAPPENS when centralized control freaks are allowed to circumvent free market evolution.

120 hour weeks, even back then, were RARE, and they are not what a clock-puncher thinks of as 120 hours. When 120 hour weeks happened, here is what REALLY happens if you are stuck with that type of schedule for a while: you don’t do anything else and it’s not that much different that MOTHER’S hard working life!

Those are 17 hours a day average weeks, but you EAT at work, and you sit down and rest some and are not off the clock for that rest. You grab a newspaper and read it between cases. You call some people on the phone. You even take some NAPS in that 120 hours and are on the clock. You sometimes shower and clean up at the hospital on the clock. You are living your life at the hospital just like a submariner in battle. Its requires dedication and sacrifice, but it is DOABLE.

So you get 7 hours average OFF a day and for that 7 hours you probably will basically sleep the entire time and then go back to work. The US military does this too when in combat. Add in your naps and youth and the fact that you have adapted to the situation: you are functional, and it’s hard, and it requires dedication, but it is not the disaster you think.

How many Freepers already sleep basically 6-7 hours a day? If you work 10 hours and then work at home 7 hours and sleep 6-7 hours you are doing the same dang thing as residents did back in the day of medicine.

Bottom line, and this is why you have me irritated:

The FREE MARKET and the SEVERAL STATES are supposed to makes these decisions, NOT a FASCIST CABAL comprised of various “private” (fake) regulating boards that are fully controlled by the FEDS kissing up to whatever the Feds want. (Wimp boards whose kiss-up members say “if we don’t require this thing that the government czar wants, then the government will make us do it (however unconstitutional). I say MAKE the fascists pass a law if that is what they want, don’t coerce fake private boards to do it for you, but that’s the Clintonian/Obama Fascist modus operandus in a nutshell.)

Don’t play into that by making it look like the illegal private-public actions of these coerced boards are a good think. Fight on the fringe with us!