8 ms·
Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
- ekianjo 6y agoSo they went to fish for correlations and found this? EDA at its best...
- voxl 6y agoI feel like we need an opposite saying for sentiments like this to the age old "correlation does not equal causation", something like "correlation does not mean automatically dismiss"
- Quekid5 6y agoIndeed, and this finding could at the very least be said to have some plausible underlying (perhaps indirect) causation.
- graderjs 6y agoCorrelation doesn't imply causation but it could co-occur with it Too long Correlative causation is more correlated with causation than non-correlative causation Too tongue twisting Correlation is closer to causation than no correlation I like that Ignoring possible causation is correlated with stupidity Too cruel Correlation does not equal causation but they are correlated Not bad Anyone else?
- endgame 6y agoCorrelation correlates with causation.
- alberto_ol 6y agoCorrelation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/
- gvx 6y agoI always liked xkcd's "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." (https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/) although it is rather long.
- kkoncevicius 6y agoThe comment you replied to has nothing to do with "correlation does not equal causation". The point was that fishing for results, by trying everything, is guaranteed to find something. So if, in a study like this, they looked at differences in morality rate between: 1) men and women, 2) younger and older people, 3) younger and older surgeons, 4) surgeries in summer vs winter 4) surgeries in morning vs evening 5) etc etc.... And it came down all the way to n) surgeries on birthday - to find an effect. Then it would be almost guaranteed that such a finding is spurious.
- emn13 6y agoThis is a huge problem in scientific papers; it's very, very common to see results for all kinds of metrics with confidence intervals or p-values and then see a few "significant" measurements, without a mention of the fact that multiple tests were made - and implicitly, possibly many more tests were made during the exploratory phase of the research. What does significance even mean then? Hard to say (there are techniques to try and compensate of course, but they have their own issues). One simple way we can at least mitigate that problem is by requiring far lower p-values (or wider CI's), and where that's not feasible, require a much clearer-eyed explanation and acceptance of the fact that such research cannot be trivially supported by statistics, and instead additionally requires careful experimental setup and consideration of causal networks. Basically: if you have p = 0.0001 or whatever I'm more willing to believe that publication biases and multiple testing aren't super likely to cause false positives that often. But without that, you want a clear hypothesis and proposed way to test published beforehand, and just one test, and ideally a clear hypothesis about causation etc too, so you can critically push and prod the results to try and distinguish noise from signal. A p=0.03 just isn't very obvious, at all. In general, I think modern science is too reliant on statistics over complex systems, and in the effort to tease out significance then needs to try and correct for all kinds of known interference (confounders) and other effects; thus then need to use more advanced statistical models and less general assumptions about distributions (whether for significance, or for mathematical tractability), that it's just very hard for anyone to say they didn't make some systematic error somewhere. And sure, being an expert in the subject matter and having an expert statistician on hand helps, but making reasoning errors is too easy; too human to reliably avoid. Instead of seeking signals in noise, we should be targeting research more narrowly to parts of the puzzle that we can measure better, then use classical plain logic to put the pieces together - not try and measure the whole thing in one go. After we put all the well-measured pieces together, validating with tricky statistics is reasonable as a sanity check, but not much more than that. If common sense is hard, statistics is harder, even for statisticians. Interpreting results like this as any more than "huh, that's something we could look into" is unwise.
- yellowcake0 6y agoThe website is currently unavailable so I can't read the article. However p-hacking, to which I believe the parent comment was referring, is a separate issue. I agree that the incessant belaboring of the difference between correlation and causation in these types of threads is tiresome, but I don't think it applies in this case.
- randomsearch 6y agoHow about "if you find a correlation and want to report this as if you think it's significant, then you should formulate a specific hypothesis and perform independent experiments to test it, rather than publishing junk."
- randomsearch 6y agoApparently this isn't junk: I couldn't access the original at the time of posting, so I relied on a second hand bogus interpretation. Apologies!
- wruza 6y agoDo we? Wait for an hour and there will be a bunch of plausible..apparent descriptions that “invalidate” that “they’re just negligent on their birthday”.
- martin_a 6y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 6y agoWell, that's how you discover things. You go fish for correlations, and publish any interesting findings, so another group can get independent data and check them. On the meanwhile, a news reporter gets your (probably spurious) correlations and announce them for the entire world as "the TRUTH! science says so, and you don't doubt science, do you?" That's basically how science gets done on any complex field where we can't test things directly.
- sebmellen 6y ago> The researchers emphasized that this study focused on common procedures, and on older Medicare patients. This means that the findings may not apply to other types of patients, or to other surgical procedures. Is there any reason Medicare would play a role in the surgeon's performance?
- johncolanduoni 6y agoMedicare patients are all either 65 or older or suffering from a specific covered chronic disease.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoWell, it doesn't pay well.
- echelon 6y agoMany practices refuse to take Medicare patients. It's less pay, more paperwork. Sucks if you're on Medicare. You're stuck with the doctors that do accept it, which probably weeds out some of the better practices. Healthcare and getting old suck in the US. Think about how this might affect, say, your parents. And eventually you.
- cmeacham98 6y agoMedicare (as in the method of payment) obviously wouldn't, but by only polling Medicare patients they bias the patients, as Medicare patients are predominately the elderly.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> Is there any reason Medicare would play a role in the surgeon's performance? Lots of reasons: "Generally, Medicare is available for people age 65 or older, younger people with disabilities and people with End Stage Renal Disease (permanent kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplant)." And often poorer than private insurance, so less preventive and post-operative care and rehabilitation. eg. I watched a documentary on urban diabetes patients and foot amputations. Amputation is literally an epidemic in poor Americans because they can't afford homecare, so have to keep walking on a gangrenous foot until it turns black.
- im3w1l 6y ago> Research on judges has yielded similar results. It has found, for example, that external factors as diverse as outdoor temperatures and sports results can influence judges’ decisions. When I hear of these funky effects I always wonder how they relate to AI. Presumably this is somehow related to some kind of lossy compression of the state of the world, maybe similar to principal components[0]? Where the "I feel grumpy" component is a mix of defendant-is-guilty, temperature-is-low and my-team-lost. It might also be related to the binding problem[1]? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sixhobbits 6y agoAlso interesting is "Impossibly Hungry Judges". Many of these correlation effects are paradoxically so strong that they they _cannot_ be the true explanation. [0] http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges
- tokai 6y ago"The phenomenon of favorable decisions peaking after a meal break is likely an artifact of the order of case presentation. It is not evidence that meal breaks affect the boards’ decisions." https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833.full https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833.full
- mattkrause 6y agoYup. Even ignoring the lack of randomization, there’s another issue with the hungry judges paper that should have raised some eyebrows. They fit a model using both the case order (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc) and the time elapsed. Either is significantly related to the case’s outcome, but when both are included, the rank explains away the time elapsed. This is obviously not compatible with increasing hunger/decreasing blood sugar, since those should depend on wall-time.
- cryptica 6y agoMaybe a surgeon is more likely to be assigned to a risky surgery on an elderly patient when it's the surgeon's birthday.
- imtringued 6y agoOr they simply decline non risky surgeries because they want to take a day off or leave earlier.
- rightbyte 6y agoYe even if they just decline overtime on their birthday and prioritize worse off patient during working hours this stat would show up.
- KMag 6y agoI suspect a causation along those lines would be that surgeons are less likely to push back surgeries to the day after their birthday if they're worried that the patient may soon become too sick to operate on.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rzz3 6y agoThe surgeon has their mind in other places on their birthday perhaps?
- kkoncevicius 6y ago> The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. So, only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their birthdays. Would be interesting to compare the outcomes using the same surgeon group: surgeries on birthday vs same-surgeon surgeries on other dates.
- lmilcin 6y agoThe question is, are surgeons that are likely to work on their birthdays any different from the ones that would take day off.
- spiderfarmer 6y agoI never took the day off on my birthday, but a lot of people do. So it might also make sense to ask why these surgeons are operating on their birthdays. Did they take the day off and went back to perform surgery on a critical patient? Are they overworked? Etc.
- rightbyte 6y agoI mean surgeries on Christmas probably are way more fatal too since they are the ones that can't wait. You would excepct that it is the day after your birthday the surgeon is worse (risk for hangover or less sleep).
- mikestew 6y agoIt’s coming up on a year since I got wheeled into the operating room as my Christmas present for 2019. I’m obviously still here to tell the tale, but the thought did cross my mind: “how much of a hurry are you to get home, Dr. Takiyama?” But according to TFA, a Christmas Day surgery was about equal in risk to one on the surgeon’s birthday. Which means my worries weren’t entirely unfounded.
- englishrookie 6y agoIs that a thing in the US, taking a day off on your birthday? To the best of my knowledge, nobody does that in Europe - certainly not in the Netherlands.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago> They also found that some surgeons did not work on their birthdays Is this partially that better/more experienced/senior/more affluent doctors are taking their birthday off, hence people getting more junior doctors? It would be interesting to see how many more people die on a particular surgeons birthday compared with the rest of their year, rather than the birthday of the surgeon a patient gets.
- bottled_poe 6y agoThose that are working on their birthday also more likely to do so under emergency situations...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- svrtknst 6y agoAre they? Sounds odd that the norm would be for people to take birthdays off.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoI may be making this up, but aren't there some rather strict rules about surgeons and alcohol? It may make them more likely to just take the day off.
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoI'd guess that few surgeons start boozing at breakfast on their birthday or have a lunchtime drinking session to celebrate. But are more likely to be rushing off to have a party than actually be impaired.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoI more thought you might need to request the day off to avoid being on call, surgeons have very unstable hours.
- paulintrognon 6y agoArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201212210709/https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/elderly-emergency-surgery-patients-23-more-likely-to-die-if-operation-takes-place-on-surgeons-birthday/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201212210709/https://www.psych...
- pankajdoharey 6y agoOK and how is this observational fact of any scientific relevance? Well there could be a similar observation like Elderly people are X% more likely to die if the moon is in the fifth phase of jupiter. So by some hocus-pocus astrological deduction this is a Study worth considering?
- wjnc 6y agoLink to the paper itself [1]. There is a list of secondary analysis in the paper that answer some of the concerns raised in other comments. [1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381
- billfruit 6y agoIn general I wonder there is some QA/QC process involved in surgery, may be have some sort of independent evaluators observe each surgery and ensure the work is being done upto the laid down guidelines.
- wruza 6y agoMore than a decade ago we had to digitize some org’s patient cards into a database. After running few “test” queries against that dataset out of curiosity we found out that you’re less likely to be alcoholic-y if you live on 4-5 floor. The explanation I thought was that they hang out outside, but those who live higher have harder time to go home and prefer to not go. Building with 6+ stories usually have an elevator and “the problem” disappears.
- fart32 6y agoThis might be different elsewhere, but here, the apartments on lower floors are typically rented and they're cheaper than those on higher floors. It's the case at the building I currently live in, although it's because on the lower floors, there are more apartments (smaller ones) than on the higher ones. Roof apartments are all sold out, not rented. So, I could imagine, that the higher floors are occupied by more wealthy people, who might be less prone to alcoholism. This theory, however, doesn't check out for high rise prefab houses. But it could perhaps cause the deviation?
- wruza 6y agoPerhaps. The answer is it’s unknown. It was the first time I met correlation so clearly irl, and my idle guess was naive and obviously stupid. There was no info on building types or sqft/m2, but lower and higher floors are historically cheaper here (1st is little loud/non-private and last is little cold and flood-prone).
- mhh__ 6y agohttps://www.england.nhs.uk/2019/01/surgical-safety-checklist/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/2019/01/surgical-safety-checklist... Getting surgeons to adopt the kind of "It's obvious but point and speak or you're fired"-style checklists a la operating an aircraft has reduced complications (from the minor to deaths) by several percent in the NHS. It's perhaps worrying given how low-hanging some of these fruit are - i.e. "Do we have the right patient?".
- tomxor 6y agoI'm probably going to sound silly now but I do this when doing any technical work I deem important or critical enough, point and say outloud what it's for or what state it should be in or in the imperative what to do to it... it does work, it somehow catches silly mistakes compared to keeping everything in your mind, and also gives you confidence because it works like a checklist. Known as pointing and calling in transport AFAIK.
- kba 6y agoWhat you're describing is very similar to Rubber duck debugging. The idea here is that forcing you to explain what you're trying to do makes it easier for you to catch your mistakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- mhh__ 6y agoIts absolutely not silly. It's similar to why formal verification is so important in hardware, because it's effectively forcing you to be specific about semantics and let's the computer walk through things for you.
- rzzzt 6y agoI do this when I am the last to leave a building. "This window is closed... these lamps are off". I read about the transport-related part of it in this article: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...
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- quickthrower2 6y agoI’m going to guess (article won’t load for me) it is because the title should be “proportion of elderly deaths is 23% higher for surgery done on surgeons birthday” which might be a different thing if working on your birthday confounds with a certain type of surgery E.g. emergency surgery and being on call vs. elective surgery
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moosinho 6y agoGood point. That's probably also the case for surgeries on national holidays.
- throwawaylolx 6y agoIt is: >The effect size of surgeons’ birthday observed in our analysis (1.3 percentage point increase or a 23% increase in mortality), though substantial, is comparable to the impact of other events, including holidays (eg, Christmas and New Year) and weekends, which have been argued to affect the quality of patient care.
- UncleMeat 6y agoIt isn't a good point. This was explicitly controlled for in the study. People are just making wild guesses about methodological limitations that don't exist.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoThat is not correct, the article talks about methodology: > The patients were all Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 to 99. They had all undergone one of 17 common emergency surgical procedures between 2011 and 2014. Examples of those 17 procedures included cardiovascular surgeries, hip and femur fracture, appendectomy, and small bowel resection. The study focused on emergency surgery, so as to minimize the potential selection bias. For example, surgeons might otherwise choose patients based on their illness severity, or patients might choose their surgeon.
- samplenoise 6y ago> The effect size of surgeons’ birthday observed in our analysis (1.3 percentage point increase or a 23% increase in mortality), though substantial, is comparable to the impact of other events, including holidays (e.g., Christmas and New Year) and weekends. > But the authors say the “natural experiment” in the present study is more revealing than, for example, holiday-related mortality rates. That is because “those events not only affect physicians’ performance but also influence patients’ decision to seek care (i.e., patients seeking care on these special days might be sicker than those seeking care on other days), as well as hospital staffing.” Unless, of course, the patients know their surgeon’s birthday, which is unlikely (though that may change if this study becomes widely known). That doesn't take exclude the possibility that surgeons may be assigned different patients on their birthdays. Some studies on the 'weekend effect' [1] seem to also control for illness severity, not clear if that was done here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekend_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekend_effect
- samplenoise 6y ago"The effect size of surgeons’ birthday observed in our analysis (1.3 percentage point increase or a 23% increase in mortality), though substantial, is comparable to the impact of other events, including holidays (e.g., Christmas and New Year) and weekends. (...) But the authors say the “natural experiment” in the present study is more revealing than, for example, holiday-related mortality rates. That is because “those events not only affect physicians’ performance but also influence patients’ decision to seek care (i.e., patients seeking care on these special days might be sicker than those seeking care on other days), as well as hospital staffing.” Unless, of course, the patients know their surgeon’s birthday, which is unlikely (though that may change if this study becomes widely known)." That doesn't take exclude the possibility that surgeons may be assigned different patients on their birthdays. Some studies on the 'weekend effect' [1] seem to also control for illness severity, not clear if that was done here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekend_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekend_effect
- Ensorceled 6y agoAnecdotally, my father-in-law was chief of staff for a small city hospital and they had a rule about not scheduling afternoon surgeries on important days like anniversaries, birthdays, etc. Basically, if the surgery started going long, you didn't want the surgeon worrying about missing their spouses birthday, birthday with their kids or an anniversary. It actually wasn't that many surgeries delayed, as the surgeon just juggled surgeries and consults/paperwork/insurance to fit. If this is fairly standard practice, then an afternoon birthday surgery would be an emergency situation and, hence, more deadly. Given the paper said some surgeons take the day off entirely, any surgeon with that habit would be performing an emergency surgery.
- colonwqbang 6y agoThis is a beautiful conjecture! The problem is amusingly circular. Even if you reject the conjure in parent comment, you will be tempted to reduce the number of birthday surgeries due to the increased mortality. This will mean that birthday surgeries are only done in even more desperate circumstances which of course will increase the risk. So mitigation of this problem will lead to the percentage increasing even more! Actually, it turns out that it is possibly better if the percentage is high!
- Ensorceled 6y agoYes, it does really mean you need to dig into actual causation or the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the ass.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoI do not completely understand your points. Shouldn't hospitals have multiple surgeons? If one of them is on vacation, the other one does the work, and vice versa?
- Galanwe 6y agoI don't think surgeons are fongible assets. There is a lot of planning and study taking place before a complex operation. Not to mention most surgeons have specialties.
- michalu 6y agoSo you have 365 days in the year when a surgery can take place but only one day when a surgeon can have birthday. You compare two samples of 364:1 ratio ... it wouldn't be suprising the tiny sample gets some crazy deviations. Yet you find nothing so you're forced to dig in deeper (well this kind of content does well on internet you better find something) and bam there's a deviation for elderly patients, now you've got something to get your work talked about ... Funny the website that hosts the study* even displays an "altmetric" chart showing how many media talk about it, how many tweets etc. Well done science :) *https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381
- aldo712 6y agoThe website appears to be down. [1] is an archived snapshot. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201216100507/https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/elderly-emergency-surgery-patients-23-more-likely-to-die-if-operation-takes-place-on-surgeons-birthday/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201216100507/https://www.psych...
- Someone 6y agoFor those wondering about that “elderly”: the researchers only looked at “100% fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 to 99 years who underwent one of 17 common emergency surgical procedures in 2011-14” (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381), so they didn’t check whether this applies to non-elderly patients. It also is worth noting that this is published in the BMJ Christmas Issue (https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-types/christmas-issue https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...), so it should be taken with a grain of salt.
- seebetter 6y agoI’ve worked with a lot of surgeons and have heard/seen a lot of unbelievable things. Human beings are human. And often poorly educated in principles and ethics.
- nvrGiveUp 6y agoMedical is beyond Science unfortunately. The club exists to protect their extraordinarily high wages and protect them from punishments. There's a reason physicians don't consider themselves scientists. If they make an error they can claim they knew from Tradition/Art/Authority. It's politically impossible to outspend the US Physician Cartel (AMA), so I doubt we will have a Science based alternative or science based reform.
- bluesign 6y ago“ The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday” Actual data: 2064/980876 operation on bday 6.9% die, rate = 142 death Expected: (if we use non bday death rate) 1/365=0.0027 2687 operation With better 5.6% death rate = 150 death So deaths are only 6% more, so basically they are doing less and more emergency operations on birthday, so death rate is increasing it seems. It means they are making 23% less operations on birthday then any normal day.
- throwawaylolx 6y agoThe results are a lot less interesting when you read that the risk increase they found is comparable to that present during regular weekends: >The effect size of surgeons’ birthday observed in our analysis (1.3 percentage point increase or a 23% increase in mortality), though substantial, is comparable to the impact of other events, including holidays (eg, Christmas and New Year) and weekends, which have been argued to affect the quality of patient care.
- huntermeyer 6y agoSpurious Correlations: http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- andreygrehov 6y agoSimilarly, postoperative mortality rises as the day of the week of elective surgery approaches the weekend [1] [2]. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29251716/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29251716/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020160
- e_f_rodrigues 6y agoThis is part of the BMJ Christmas Edition... "While we welcome light-hearted fare and satire, we do not publish spoofs, hoaxes, or fabricated studies." https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-types/christmas-issue https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...
- dangus 6y agoA reminder about statistical math: If something is 23% more likely to happen, you have to look at the original probability to get a handle on whether that increase is serious. For example, if something has a 5% chance of happening, and it’s now 23% more likely, that means it now has a 6.15% chance of happening.
- mrfusion 6y agoCouldn’t this be that surgeons don’t want to schedule surgeries on their birthdays so they end up only scheduling the sickest and most urgent? (Sorry if that’s already been suggested)
- pps 6y ago> The study focused on emergency surgery, so as to minimize the potential selection bias. For example, surgeons might otherwise choose patients based on their illness severity, or patients might choose their surgeon.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MeteorMarc 6y agoHow come nobody mentioned the day <em>after</em> the surgeon's birthday?
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoWhat makes that day more special than 2 days after the surgeon's birthday? Or any other "normal" day of the year.
- vincengomes 6y agoIf there was a party on Surgeons Birthday, he might be hung-over the next day. Like the day after Christmas. or New Year.
- mrfusion 6y agoLet’s do a study; how many more bugs do programmers produce if they work on their birthday? (Im most careers, do people even take their birthday off?)
- TehShrike 6y agoI couldn't find this anywhere: what was the standard deviation of the mortality rate between non-birthday surgery days?
- Raphmedia 6y agoI recently had a complex facial surgery. Before doing so, I tracked all informations I could about my surgeon. Everyone had good comments, good healing, very impressive track record, etc. Everyone but one patient. She complained on how her surgery was rushed, how quick she was out of the operating theater, how she is scarred from it, etc. At first, I thought she was lying. Why was she such an outlier? I asked her for more details. It turns out her surgery was in the afternoon of the last friday before the Christmas holidays. After knowing this, I made sure to schedule in during the middle of the week aways from holidays. My surgery went well. I am glad to finally have statistics on this gut feeling I had. 23% is a LOT, and the 30% for the holidays is even worst. I had made a mental note to avoid those days, now it's become a rule.
- cloverich 6y agoJust a note, this (and many) titles report _releative_ change as the percentage. E.g. 1% -> 1.5% report as "50% increase". It is IMHO very misleading. At one point I developed a gut reaction to any statistic "Relative or absolute".
- Raphmedia 6y ago6.9% vs 5.6%. Still a big increase and that's just the deaths. I would imagine that errors follow a similar curve.
- Taylor_OD 6y agoI read something similar based on how long the surgeon had been working that day. I always wondered how plausible it was to show up for surgery day and ask the surgeon how many hours of sleep they got the night before and how long they have been working that day.
- ConradKilroy 6y agoSolution, allow doctors and surgeons time off from bday!
- parentheses 6y agoWhat about the day after?
- Triv888 6y agoWhat about non elderly patients? This study appears to be biased