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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.'"

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Statistics can be misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    On Question Time Anna Soubry (Under-Secretary of State for Health) said that some doctors schedule more at-risk surgeries on a Friday because then they will be able to deal with the patient during the weekend when they don't have surgeries planned. You do need to be careful when you want to find explanations for statistics like these. Your immediate reaction can easily be wrong.

    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.

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      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  2. The staff are dead as well?! by Smivs · · Score: 5, Funny

    The skeleton staff working on weekends might be to blame.

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    Smivs on the intertubes!