Job profile! Sleep doctor: how do you become a stress and sleep doctor?

Sleeping well is important for Health and stress reduction. A doctor tells how and why he made the topic his professional focus.

Late risers as a child

I always liked to sleep, that was always important to me. I remember how great it was when I was a child that I slept well on weekends. I also have very clear memories of how I got up when it was snowing to get ready for school, and eagerly listened to the radio hoping that there would be a message that the school would remain closed.

If the school was actually closed once, I could go straight back to my bed and treat myself to an extra hat full of sleep! Since my parents both taught at a public school, it always became a family event.

The decision to become a doctor

When I was seven years old, the doctor prescribed me some medicine for a bad cold. It had to be taken at regular intervals around the clock, so mine woke me up Mother at night and I had to swallow the intensely tasting liquid antibiotic. Nighttime awakenings and subsequent falling asleep seemed to make the night longer. I loved it.

In the third grade, I had made up my mind to become a doctor, because I enjoyed drawing organs and remembering the Latin names of muscles. Family and friends always gave me great praise when I told them about my plans, which strengthened my determination for sure even further solidified.

Fascinating sleep

Later I worked in dermatology for a while, in pediatrics for a while and even in orthopedics. Various life decisions and a lucky coincidence ultimately made sleep my area of ​​work. I was concerned with sleep long before I became a doctor. Even before I even studied medicine.

I was fascinated by Study of sleep, conducted sleep studies and even got my hands dirty when it came to research. My hands got really dirty doing sleep apnea studies with Yucatán minipigs when I was a student. Pigs make fantastic experimental "persons" for sleep studies, they can snore just as loudly as any human apnea sufferer.

For all those who are not so familiar with the Yucatán mini pig: "Mini" is actually nothing but their patience when a teenager tries to shave her tail and attach a probe. When it came to sleep, the price wasn't too high for me to smell like a dung heap. My curiosity has remained unusually high to this day.

Medical self-experiments

As a doctor, I want to know as much as possible about what my patients are going through. To this end, over the years I have voluntarily had blood drawn and completed a three-hour battery of neuropsychological tests. I had a feeding tube up my nose, my muscles electrocuted, and lidocaine injected into the gold in my hip, which made it numb. I even got a powerful electromagnet on Head fixed, causing my arm to cramp uncontrollably.

My medical experiments reached their climax when, during a boring night of on-call duty, I asked if I could fast jump into the MRI scanner to get some pictures of mine Brain to get. I was interested in the experience itself, and I also wanted to know what was going on in my upstairs room. All my patients said it was very loud in the tube, you got it light claustrophobia and it was pathetic overall. I wasn't particularly impressed. What struck me was the size of my cerebellum - it was oddly small. I hung my MRI in the neurology resident's reading room the next morning.

It was customary to post unusual pictures or a diagnostic dilemma so that other physicians could write their presumptions and theories alongside the pictures. Of those who did not register my name on the recordings, virtually everyone wrote "cerebellar hypotrophy of the cerebellum" or "unusually small cerebellum." Surprisingly, my cerebellum (the part of the brain that is responsible for muscle coordination, indicated by the arrow in the picture) was a little tiny, as can be seen in the picture. The vast majority of those who noticed my name were "testicular atrophy" (testicular loss). Smart ass.

Experience what my patients experienced

The bottom line is that despite some occasionally unwelcome information, I would like to have experienced what my patients are experiencing. This creates trust and a common ground on which to work. I want to help my patients as much as I can with their problems and understand what they are going through. As a sleep expert, I help patients with their sleep problems every day. I am also very fortunate to work with many professional athletes to help them as well Solution to help their sleep problems. This can mean, for example, that I Team help the times for a long car trip to planwhere they are cheapest to travel. It may mean helping an athlete and their family adjust to a new baby in the house.

Many athletes suffer from insomnia before important competitions or after poor performance. In any situation, I hope players to optimize their Performance help by improving their sleep. The great thing about sleep is that it affects all kinds of people. Over the years, I have had the privilege of living in my home country, the United States, with elite members of the military and... Technology as well as working with students and helping them perform better through better sleep.

Become a better doctor through experience

These experiences have made me a better doctor for my patients. It's a rewarding task. This book was born out of a desire to help my patients. I wanted that Peoplewho are struggling with sleep, something concrete in the Hand give so that they in relation to their sleep that tax can take matters into their own hands again. And I wanted to pass on what I've learned in more than twenty years in this field.

Speaking of doctors, I would like to take a look behind the scenes of a typical medical school. Regardless of the subject area that a doctor will ultimately choose, every student in a medical school studies everything. Medical students spend years listening to one lecture after another on all aspects of medicine. Therefore, this part of medical training is not suitable for an exciting TV series.

Why medical training to sleep is often insufficient

In my sophomore year, a neurologist teaching sleep medicine walked into our classroom and told us that over the next fifty minutes we would learn about sleep disorders. I still remember this lecture well. She began by videotaping an interview with an elderly couple. the Ms. cried when her husband choked with voice told that he had dreamed of chasing a deer through his stable. He recalled that as he caught the deer and was about to press its head against the stable wall, he woke up and had his wife's head in his hand.

This was an example of REM sleep behavior disorder, in which motor function, which is normally reduced during sleep and dreams, is maintained. The neurologist also discussed sleep apnea, but I don't remember that because, like most of the other students, I was too shocked to pay attention by the video we'd just watched. As quickly as the lecture had started, it was over. That was the full extent of ours Vocational Training about sleep and your GP may not have learned more about sleep either.