Copyright 1999 The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

FROM VALDEZ TO CHALLENGER, THE HIDDEN SAFETY FLAW WAS SLEEP
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

I've discovered, in the meantime, that medical science is having difficulty catching up with the research of so-called sleep medicine.

The experts in sleep research have a simple solution for those of us in a culture that is driven to stay up late and get up early (or, as in my case, to work late and grab sleep when one can in the morning): "avoid dangerously high sleep debt by adding a relatively small amount of sleep to [one's] normal sleep schedule."

Read this correctly. The experts are encouraging us to get more sleep; in fact, they’re now telling employers that workers who sleep well and adequately -- even if it's at the workplace -- are safer and more productive employees.

It appears the medical profession -- and both the academic and practical experts who pervade our lives -- have had "a gigantic blind spot" regarding the phenomenon of sleep. Humans spend about one-third of every day asleep; yet, relatively little is known about what is happening to us during those hours or what sleep means to us.

Perhaps worse, those who sleep adequately are often characterized as lazy, wimpish, unmotivated or dreamers, the brunt of a whole category of cultural jokes.

The grand master of sleep research is Dr. William C. Dement, who in 1970 began the world's first sleep disorders laboratory at Stanford University. For the past 30 years, Dement has been waging an uphill battle to arouse medical doctors and government bureaucrats from their pervasive ignorance about sleep.

This year, Dement put his thirty years of frustration, exhilaration, despair and delight as a student of sleep into a book that attempts not only to chronicle the research but to hold out hope that we’ll soon treat our sleeping hours as an important and insightful period of our lives. Dement suggests our failure to do so is life threatening.

Dement's book, written with Christopher Vaughan, is called "The Promise of Sleep" (Delacorte Press, 1999), and it attempts to make the seeming obvious connection between human health, happiness and a good night's sleep (or, in the case of people like me, a good day's sleep).

Veteran journalists will be interested to read Dement's telling of the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in March of 1989. The civil trial resulting from the spilling of crude oil into Prince William Sound -- an accident that cost an estimated $2 billion to clean up -- ended in 1995 with $5 billion in punitive damages to the Exxon Corp.

As Dement notes, the public perception, and that of most people in the media, is that the giant tanker ran aground on a clear night and is linked to alcohol consumption on the part of the captain.

Dement argues instead that the tanker ran aground because of severe sleep deprivation on the part of a mate who was at the helm (he'd slept for only six hours of the previous 48), and that the captain was not on the bridge when crucial steering miscalculations were made that prevented the Exxon Valdez from turning because it had mistakenly been left on autopilot.

Even the trial, Dement notes, did not take sleep deprivation much into account despite a National Transportation Safety Board report citing the lack of sleep as a direct cause. According to Dement, "the poor captain has been hounded for nearly a decade" concerning alcoholism when the true culprit in the oil spill is lack of sleep by those responsible for operating the vessel.

Perhaps more startling is Dement's note on the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which, as almost everyone knows, investigators have traced to faulty O-rings installed on the ill-fated craft that should have kept NASA from launching the ship.

Speaking of the investigation after the tragedy, Dement says, "Not well known at all is the fact that the Human Factors Subcommittee attributed the error to the severe sleep deprivation of the NASA managers." Only included in the subcommittee's final report, Dement notes, is evidence that NASA's top managers typically sacrifice the most sleep in the waning hours before such launches.

The crusading Dement focuses most importantly on "sleep debt," best described as overcharging one’s sleep credit card. "If we can learn to understand sleep indebtedness and manage it," Dement writes, "we can improve everyday life as well as avoid many injuries, horribly diminished lives, and premature deaths."

Few items characterize the problem we face as does Dement's frustration at trying to convince Washington bureaucrats that research funding to study sleep is necessary and worthwhile. (Incidentally, workers in Dement's lab typically, like me, stay awake at night and sleep during the day.)

Dement notes that sleep is often associated with laziness or sloth, pointing to the 19th Century attitude typified by the great inventor Thomas Edison, who thought anyone who slept more than four hours each night was a malingerer. Edison needed only two hours himself.

The attitude is similarly captured in the ancient rule of St. Benedict: "Refrain from too much eating or sleeping," the saint urged his followers.

The point is, and Dement's research grandly supports this: We don't esteem sleep in our culture; it is perceived as a necessary evil or a playful annoyance. Ironically, among the most sleep-deprived in medicine's subculture are young doctors working in emergency wards, sometimes in 30-to-40 hours stretches.

Dement's message, with its array of anecdotes and research examples indicting loss of sleep in many of our tragedies and illnesses, is that we are a "sleep sick society."

My changing hours, which have driven my interest in sleep, may lead to one of the most healthful changes in my life. It is being driven home to me dramatically how important it is to my life -- and the lives of those with whom I live and work -- to get enough sleep.