Sleep Medicine is actually a sub-specialty of Pulmonary Medicine. So, to become a Pulmonologist/Sleep specialist, you need to have 4 years Pre-Med, 4 years Med school, 3-4 years of Internal Medicine Residency. After that, you have to apply to become a Pulmonologist, which is rather competitive. Regardless, it's a two year fellowship in pulmonary medicine, which means that you're the defacto king of the ICU for 2 years. Sometimes, pulmonologists take an extra one year to study sleep medicine.

So, on average, your sleep specialists have about 13-15 years of schooling. It's about the same ammount of time that it would take to become a Plastic surgeon, or Interventional Cardiologist, Cardiothoracic Surgeon of Invasive Radiologist.

It's not a light weight course of study. Certainly not 4 hours worth.

In my case the specialists I saw were at the Sleep Medicine and Research Center in St. Louis, MO. The presiding doctors there are James K. Walsh, Ph.D., and Gihan Kader, M.D.

Dr. Walsh in particular is a professor at the nearby St. Louis University. If you do a search on Medline for Dr. Walsh you will see that he is active and published with studies on sleep disorders.

http://www.stlukes-stl.com/services/sleep_medicine/research_...

Great. So how do you explain the fact that these wonderful specialists got the half-life of caffeine so completely wrong?