Medical doctors (MD) are overworked, particularly when they are hatchlings (i.e. Medical School students) and fledglings (interns and residents). So overworked, that in many countries is routine to have 80-hour weeks and 30-hour shifts as residents and interns. This is a concern as it has been shown that sleep deprivation impairs learning (which is the whole point of residency) and increases the number of medical mistakes (the lack of which is the whole point of their profession).
Lin et al. (2013) show that it can do more than that. Couple internship and cell phones and you get… hallucinations. That’s right. The authors asked 73 medical interns to complete some tests before their internship, then every third, sixth, and twelfth months of their internship, and after the internship. The questionnaires were on anxiety, depression, personality, and cell phone habits and hallucinations. That is: the sensation that your cell phone is vibrating or ringing when, in fact, it is not (which fully corresponds to the definition of hallucination). And here is what they found:
Before internship, 78% of MDs experienced phantom vibration and 27% experienced phantom ringing.
During their 1-year internship, about 85 to 95% of MDs experienced phantom vibration and phantom ringing.
After the internship when the MDs did no work for two weeks, 50% still had these hallucinations.
The MDs’ depression and anxiety were also elevated more during the internship than before or after (see Fig. 1), but there was no correlation between the hallucinations and the depression and anxiety scores.
These findings are disturbing on so many levels… Should we be worried that prolonged exposure to cell phones can produce hallucinations? Or that o good portion of the MDs have hallucinations before going to internship? Or that 90% the people in charge with your life or your child’s life are so overworked that are hallucinating on a regular basis? Fine, fine, believing that your phone is ringing or vibrating may not be such a big deal of a hallucination, compared with, let’s say, “the voices told me to give you a lethal dose of morphine”, but as a neuroscientist I beg the question: is there a common mechanism between these two types of hallucinations and, if so, what ELSE is the MD hallucinating about while reassuring you that your CAT scan is normal? Or, forget about the hallucinations, should we worry that your MD is probably more depressed and anxious than you? Or, the “good” news, that the medical interns provide “a model of stress-induced psychotic symptoms” better that previous models, as the authors put it (p. 5)? I really wish there was more research on positive things (… that was a pun; hallucinations are a positive schizophrenic symptom, look it up 🙂 ).
Reference: Lin YH, Lin SH, Li P, Huang WL, & Chen CY. (10 June 2013). Prevalent hallucinations during medical internships: phantom vibration and ringing syndromes. PLoS One, 8(6): e65152. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065152. Article | FREE PDF | First time the phenomenon was documented in press
By Neuronicus, 14 October 2015
The Science Portal 