Sleep ‘devalued’
“The sleep field has been fighting to get more sleep education into medical education for decades,” AHA volunteer expert Michael A. Grandner, PhD, Director of the Sleep & Health Research Program and of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, said in an interview.
“To my knowledge, there still is not a lot of attention given to it, partly because the culture in medical school and among residents is one of not sleeping,” said Dr. Grandner, who was not involved in the study. “The culture among physicians is ‘Who needs sleep? I function fine without it.’ ”
“Sleep made it to the checklist because it is a biological requirement for human life,” he noted. “We sleep for the same reason we breathe and drink. It’s an imperative. Yet we live in a society that devalues sleep.”
It’s “extremely unusual” for a doctor to ask a patient how they’re sleeping, he said. “It’s also pretty unusual to have sleep-related conversations between doctors and patients, especially in the context of health, not just, ‘Hey, doc, I can’t sleep, throw me a pill.’”
Clinicians should be asking every patient about how they’re sleeping at every visit, Dr. Grandner said. “It’s now part of the official definition of heart health. Just like you would be remiss if you didn’t ask about smoking or test blood pressure, you’d be missing something important by not asking about sleep – something that has similar billing to diet, exercise, blood pressure, and all the other ‘essentials.’ ”
No commercial funding or conflicts of interest were declared.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.