By COLIN LAWLOR
A patient comes in for an ordinary primary care appointment. The nurse runs through the usual checklist: temperature, blood pressure, pulse, weight, sometimes pulse oximetry. Sleep probably won’t come up. If it does, it will be a side note, and if the patient says, “not great,” what often follows is a brief look of sympathy and the familiar advice to relax a bit before bed.
That is, more or less, what sleep looks like in the most common diagnostic interaction in American medicine. Don’t worry, it is not much, if any better in any other country. The other vitals get numbers, while sleep gets small talk….
