The military has such an odd no-sleep culture. "Hey, let's load up a submarine full of nuclear weapons and a nuclear reactor and then generate a schedule that requires everyone on board to function at a cognitive deficit with no spatial references."
Another perplexing one is hospitals. Sleep is one of the most important factors in self-healing. However for someone in a long hospital stay, rooms often don't get completely dark, there are machines which make noise and light, and patients are often woken up throughout the night for various tests and procedures. It seems like the opposite of what you would want to do to make someone healthy.
This was shocking to me the first time I had to stay in a hospital for multiple nights. The door was always kept open for nurses, and the hallway lights and noise was constant. I had to share a room with a patient who kept the lights and television on 24/7 and, whenever she was awake, was loudly complaining to someone on her phone or threatening to kill the nurses for not giving her enough medication. I had no option for another room and had to “recover” between multiple operations in these conditions. My first week out of the hospital was focused on recovering from the hospital conditions, not my actual medical issue.
Oh you'd love to know that William Stewart Halsted, the father of residency basically was cocaine and morphine addict who thought that doctors needed to completely immerse themselves in the hospital environment and didn't need sleep at all.
Many countries follow that pattern of having patients subject to physiologically unreliable personnel; others impose some limiting rules ("No, doctor, you cannot be in the panel for the examinations of medicine students on Saturday: on Monday you operate in the surgery room and you are required to rest, just like personnel in civil aviation"); nonetheless, that some goodsensical boundaries are set is not a warranty for a properly set up system - also in those territories I have seen other personnel completely untrained on basic procedures (like nurses staring at you waiting silent for a minute, or in stillness expecting something inexplicit, then shouting "SOOOO?!" bovinely).
Anyway, yes, I consider territories in which the use sleep deprived medical personnel is tolerated a strong sign of lack of civilization, when the important factor appears that some of them state "Yes we are used to it" (?! !!!) instead of, say, "We were unduly forced by understaffing" - that some of them have no idea of the difference is a huge alarm bell.
My wife was recovering from surgery and stayed in hospital for several days.
Every 4 hours, a nurse would bust in through the door so hard the door would bounce back almost like a western saloon, in they push their cart with computer, and YELL, "We are just gonna take the blood pressure!"
Occasionally, we did get one nurse who would do this with tact.
Yeah this goes hand in hand with medical culture in general. My partner is becoming a physician, and they will make these people work 12 hour shifts, or multiple days straight, or both. We pretty much burn them out before they’ve even gotten out of residency. She hasn’t encountered any real reasoning, just “this is the way”.
It’s on purpose, they want soldiers to be able to function well in high stress and pressure situations. They do this so they train under the same conditions they would be in war. It is most definitely not healthy tho. I think the military does not really care about the health of its personnel during and after their duty.
As I understand it its bcs the military wants organizations that can function under long term stress and pressure. If personnel is always sleep deprived you will find the processes that doesn't work in that kind of environment, before you go in hot.
Works until it doesn't.