Doctor A explained how residents being used to only 80 hours a week during residency will become completely overworked once in the real doctoring world, and will be prone to making more mistakes when tired or sleep deprived.
What a load. There are a minority of physicians in a minority of specialties that come anywhere near 80 hours a week in "the real world." A few of them still go way over, like the cardiac surgeons where I work. It's no big deal to see a few of them chit chatting in the surgical ICU at 1am after someone's patient just coded and the other one just finished a 9 hour case. Those guys work insane hours every single week. Transplant surgeons can work pretty wild hours too.
The outpatient specialties though? Give me a break. I had a psychiatrist tell me that they "really only come in for emergencies when we're on call," at 3pm on a mid-week day.
BUT, for all the trash that many attendings talk about how they don't get to go home post-call like residents, it's often a lie. All of our anesthesiologists go home
at 7am when they're "post call." If they were "short call" (until 7-9pm), then they go home at noon. Our radiologists, ER docs, hospitalists, and a few other specialties
don't take call. We have off-site radiologists for at night. The neurosurgeons have no clinic and no elective cases on the weeks that they're on call. The orthopedic surgeons schedule days off when they're post-call. Even our general surgery staff get 1/2 a day per week completely free of responsibilities, and that could easily be your post-call afternoon (it's up to them). Not to mention that in a large academic group, you might only be on call three nights in a month (like two of my staff this month).
Doctor B told me that 80 hours a week wouldn't be nearly enough time to complete his training, less extending the residency by a few years. He told me he worked 120 easily, going up to over 140 a week.
Unless he's in a surgical specialty, I don't believe a word of it. Even if he is, it's still only part of the truth. There's work, and then there's "work." One of the subspecialty surgeons I worked with gave me frequent grief about how easy we have it now (he did a general surgery residency). Then he talked about how they would have Halo tournaments on Xbox with up to 12 residents in the hospital on weekends, since there were so many of them working that there wasn't much to do!
It
was worse before 2003, and they did work longer hours, especially in surgical specialties. I find it hard to believe that some specialties ever came near 80 hours a week back then either. Times have changed though for all of medicine. Things are much faster paced than back in the good ol' days (more like the 60s-70s) when a patient was admitted for a week after an inguinal hernia repair! Their patients were not anywhere near as sick as they are now, period. Therefore, we're learning with much sicker patients than they were, so are we better off now?
I am concerned that a surgeon trained in the late 90s had a better learning experience than I do now, but the only thing I can do is try to make the best of my opportunities now.