The number of blood tests and other procedures medical professional do in hospitals during the night is ridiculous. This directly disturbs the patient's circadian rythms.
About two days ago I had to spend the night in hospital to accompany my wife in a relatively stable condition due pregnancy issues. We reached sometime like 11pm. The medical professionals admitted her at 12am. Then after doing tests, she was asked to go to sleep.
Somehow at 2AM, she was woken up for a blood test. Then, there was another pregnancy related test that was ordered for her at 4AM. They put some device on her for monitoring and at around 3AM the device slipped off her leading to beeps and nurse having to interfere. Practically my wife and I had no sleep. Since the doctor had wanted the report at 4AM, I suspect she had disturbed sleep too. This kind of test-based medicine is not really helping the most important healing: sleep. I understand that late-term pregnancy is a tricky thing with the patient potentially being in labor; but if patient really goes into a labor, the patient would not be sleeping.
The blood test could have been avoided as she had a similar test less than a month ago. Even if it was not absolutely necessary, could it not not have waited till 7AM? Does it have to disturb the patient's sleep patterns. If one reads cancer research journals, disturbed sleep (irregular circadic patterns) is actually a carcinogenic progenitor; it increases chances of cancer.
When I challenged the nurse on the importance of this test now, she said it is really important if one is one blood thinners --- which my wife was not. The nurse could not answer me when I asked her how often people use blood thinners. This is "fear psychosis" based medicine. It turns out that waking up patients for blood tests in the middle of the night is pretty common in the JFK medical center in NJ; I have had pretty intense association with the hospital. I suspect that this hospital is not alone in this mindset.
A background about my wife. She is rather timid, not wanting to upset any medical personal should they be not nice to her. For example, some nurse injected some narcotic (hydocodeine I think) too fast (less than thirty seconds) into her in 2009 and she had to endure very very severe chest pain for six hours as the drug was not meant to be injected that fast. She does not like me challenging medical procedures. I suspect a large number of patients have this mindset.
This got me thinking about the problems facing current medicine:
- Business pressures have overtaken science. This is acknowledged by my doctor friends
- Medical interns putting in 90 hrs a week is not really a sign of a healthy medical system
- In my experience, nurses are many unable to think holistically
- The nurses etc. are highly stressed. Especially the nurses working in hospices.
- Via the charities Yoga Foundation and Share You Care, I have been involved in destressing the nurses in hospices
- Too much medication (partly because patients demand it)
- Many of the doctors I have interacted do acknowledge being overwhelmed by stress, meaning the risk of medical errors has gone up.
In addition, the medical science is having no good answers to the following problems:
- obesity. one-third of America is obese. Obesity is epidemic
- depression.
- cancer. There is practically no clue on what is causing cancer and how it can be cured. Current therapies just kill cells hoping to eliminate cancer, which is not a bad thing.
- depression. National Institute of Health reports that about 5% of America is clinically depressed on a yearly basis; life-time statistic is about 15%. See the image below:
The medical community is not having really good leads on the research problems of obesity and depression. There efforts, but nowhere are we close to a realistic solution.
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