Surgical residents work 100+ hours a week. They are working on life/death situations. Somehow they manage to not kill most people.

> Somehow they manage to not kill most people.

Sure, but they're killing a lot more people than the docs getting sleep.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/

"Interns working five or more extended-duration shifts per month reported more attentional failures during lectures, rounds, and clinical activities, including surgery and reported 300% more fatigue-related preventable adverse events resulting in a fatality."

I am always surprised that letting residents work such long hours is acceptable given the risks involved. Does anyone want to operated on by someone who is late into their third back to back shift?

If the choice comes down to having a sleep deprived surgeon do your surgery, versus not having the surgery, then some people will choose the sleep deprived surgeon.

Some people might, but it does not seem too common for a resident surgeon to tell a patient before cutting them open something along these lines: “Hay good fellow I haven’t slept for 48 hours and I can hardly tell which end of the scalpel to hold - do you want me to operate or not?”

Perhaps the AMA shouldn't restrict the number of residents then, in order to keep surgeon salaries high. Lives > Profit.

Well there is this slight issue. Actually the bigger problem is that AMA allows surgeons to keep their license without spending a reasonable amount of time in hospitals. There are enough surgeons trained to ensure that hospitals are always staffed with well rested people, they just aren’t willing to work when they are actually needed.

So import doctors from other countries. Its okay to depress tech worker salaries using H1Bs but not doctors?

There is no need to import doctors (the USA does do a lot of this anyway). All that is needed is to make part of the registration process that you have to x number of hours in a hospital outside of 9 to 5 (surgeons though tend to start earlier). You just set x to whatever is required to ensure that you don’t have residents working 100 hour weeks.