To be clear, you're saying that people whose job is to - quite literally - understand, diagnose, and treat hundreds (thousands?) of medical issues that they personally haven't experienced, don't have the capacity to understand that not everyone is on their same sleep schedule?
Those people spent many years learning to understand, diagnose, and treat thousands of medical issues. During that entire time, they were continuously sleep deprived as a matter of culture. Those that could not handle this environment dropped out. They're probably still sleep deprived. They may have learned about sleep's medical effects, but the personal experience of those who survived the selection process who work 120-hour weeks and have been waking patients up once an hour for years has a blinding effect on this diagnosis.
It's a bit like bringing someone from south Florida to northern Michigan this winter for some ice fishing. I understand that it's cold here, I intellectually know about, have observed the effects of, and can treat frostbite and other problems resulting from this cold - but all that would make it hard for me to intuit the problems of a visitor who was unable to control their fingers when they removed their gloves and dipped their hands into a minnow bucket to bait a hook. My fingers work fine in that bucket, everyone else on the lake is doing it, you're just going to dry them off in a few seconds and put them back in warm gloves...what's the issue?
Doctor's are notorious for not understanding their patients' experiences, and how that impacts them.
I've just witnessed this with my partner's recent bout with cancer. While her oncological surgeon completely understands, her reconstructive surgeon had no conception of what she was going through.
As someone with a father and a wife who are both physicians, yes. In both cases they started working to get into medicine in high school, pushed hard in college, and then had med school and residency.
That alone is 16 straight years of normalizing sleep deprivation. Time spent studying and working is regularly 80+ hours per week, certainly from med school onward and certainly the year spent studying for the MCAT.
If they start at 16 and finish their residency at 30 or 32, that's the only life they've ever known for all of their formative years. They cannot relate to people with a normal schedule because they have not experienced it.
The mind does funny things. They also understand that exercise and good nutrition are fundamental to health. When I worked in a hospital I normally ate in the cafeteria. The physicians had horrible diets, including the cardiologists.
Let's not even get started on how many nurses smoke.
It's my job to create applications and diagnose problems with software, but even though I've used the software in development and testing, I do not understand the experience the same way a daily user understands the experience.
Similarly, doctors and nurses do not have significant experience in being a patient, especially one who isn't around hospitals all day.
