ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some suggestions for keeping healthy physically during Foundation doctors' early years of training. Doctors are forced to embrace a level of stoicism and perfectionism in their training and often come to ignore their own physical cues. They may believe that their identity somehow magically protects from them from serious illness and use denial around symptoms they would investigate and treat actively in a patient. Frequently changing or disrupted sleep schedules and sleep deprivation alter natural circadian rhythms and cause gastrointestinal complaints such as indigestion, constipation, dyspepsia, loss of appetite, mood swings, forgetfulness, chronic fatigue and irritability. People with diabetes, epilepsy, depression and respiratory disorders are at higher medical risk when they are deprived of sleep because of disrupted physiological cycles and altered efficacy or absorption of medications that are designed to coincide with these rhythms.
