Hmm interesting. I understood it to be a made-up disease so people can 'talk to their doctors about it' and pay for medications. Basically pharma companies drumming up business by inventing diseases. How common is it? I had _never_ heard of it. I heard of heart disease, cancer, other things, I have plenty of doctors and nurses in my family. Never heard of RLS, until I started seeing commercials about.
Also wouldn't you working in a sleep clinic skew your perspective on how widespread the thing is? In other words you would only see people who have problems sleeping.
Sleep medicine is an extremely young field, beginning in earnest only in the 80s and 90s. It's not surprising that folks haven't heard of sleep disorders. Go back 10 years and ask if people had heard of sleep apnoea and you'll get a lot of puzzled looks too.
Also, I didn't say anything about how widespread it was - I said it fucked people up and it's not a pseudodisease.
It's not to say that there aren't overprescription issues, just don't fall into the Prozac trap - just because something's overprescribed doesn't mean there isn't a real disease around.
Also wouldn't you working in a sleep clinic skew your perspective on how widespread the thing is? In other words you would only see people who have problems sleeping.