"These regulations are horrible for teaching, horrible for patient care, horrible for our profession," a former chief resident at a major New York City teaching hospital told me. At least some young doctors agree. In a letter to the New England Journal, two wrote, "Although few residents object to having time off, the change in policy misses the point of why we are physicians in the first place. Physicians have chosen a difficult profession, presumably because they feel called to heal and comfort the sick and dying. We have seen the focus of our training program shift abruptly from the needs of the patient to the needs of the resident, and education has taken a back seat to the calculus of a shift-work schedule."