Here’s a question for any PoT readers who are physicians or who otherwise have experience prescribing sedative-hypnotics (aka, “sleeping pills”):

I’ve been working through D.F. Kripke’s paper “Mortality Risk of Hypnotics: Strengths and Limits of Evidence,” which claims that “hypnotics cause huge risks of” premature death in those who use them. In many ways, the paper strikes me as a methodological disaster area (here’s a cogent critique), but I’m curious what any physicians/prescribers out there think about two of the anecdotal claims Kripke makes about physicians who prescribe sedative-hypnotics. Continue reading →