What Day Not to Get Surgery – The Weird Side of the Internet

What Day Not to Get Surgery – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

One of the things about my doing weird news stories is that I really have to stretch hard to make sure I pick stories that are pure dumb fun, all Little Debbie, cotton candy fluff, no nutritional value. It’s just weird stuff. But sometimes I come across something I think people ought to know, and I feel compulsed to share. We are a media outlet after all.

So this may save your life or scare the piss out of you. I hope the former, and even if it’s the latter, hopefully you can use the information to your advantage.

A study in Canada tracked surgery outcomes of 430,000 patients who were operated on between 2007 and 2019. They were looking at ten, thirty, and ninety days after surgery, and they found an interesting thing, to put it mildly. They found an increased risk of mortality if the surgery was performed on a Friday, hovering around ten percent increased risk of post operative complications and mortality. And they came up with reasons that kind of make sense. Mainly, it’s the weekend. People aren’t there, so less tests are performed, and weekend staff don’t know the patient as well.

This kind of thing isn’t unique to medicine. In the book Thinking Fast and Slow, Dr. Daniel Kahneman studied the Israeli justice system, and noted that judges gave harsher punishments just before they ate lunch. This is probably true in America too.

If you have a Friday operation coming, this probably freaks you out. I would be freaked. Take the time to mention this study to every nurse, doctor, and surgeon you come across, make them vigilant. And if you can, have it scheduled some other day.

This may actually be the first non-dumb dumb story that could save a life. I promise the next story will have absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. In fact, I’ll try to make sure you’ll be dumber for reading it.

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