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Surgeries On Friday Are More Frequently Fatal

Posted by timothy on from the saturday-sunday-happy-days dept.

antdude writes "A British Medical Journal (BMJ) research report says that 'Surgeries on Friday Are More Frequently Fatal ... compared to those who opt for really bad Mondays, Britons who have a planned surgery on a Friday are 44 percent more likely to die. And the few patients who had a leisurely weekend surgery saw that number jump to 82 percent. The skeleton staff working on weekends might be to blame.'"

1 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Statistics can be misleading by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want real stats you have to go procedure by procedure and compare similar cases

    Which, amazingly, is exactly what the authors of the paper did. It's open-access; click the link and read it for yourself.

    Oh, wait, I forgot. On Slashdot, scientists are morons and people who read an article on a pop-sci site a month ago know everything, and any use of statistics can and must instantly be banished with the Words Of Power, Which I Will Not Utter Here.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.