[kkoncevicius]

> 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.

[spiderfarmer]

I 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]

I 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]

It’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]

Is 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.

[kjakm]

It's probably just a personal thing. I'm in Europe and always take my birthday off - I don't understand why anybody would want to work on their birthday. Even if I don't have plans to celebrate until the weekend the idea of working on my birthday is very depressing (in fact in rarely celebrate my birthday and if I do it's something small like dinner with a couple of friends). To be honest I thought it would be more prevalent in Europe given we seem to get more time off and taking time off is less 'frowned upon' (at least this is my experience compared with my US based colleagues).

[brmgb]

> I don't understand why anybody would want to work on their birthday.

I personally was under the impression that once you left childhood and the impatience of getting presents your birthday pretty much became just a day as usual. That also seems to be how my college treats it but it might be cultural. Europe is not a homogeneous place.

[Reason077]

> "I don't understand why anybody would want to work on their birthday."

Well, if you're lucky, your co-workers will chip in and buy a cake!

[onehp]

In all the work environments I've been in (UK) the culture is the opposite, as the birthday person you are expected to bring in cake.

[danpalmer]

And I've had exactly the opposite experience in the UK. I think this depends entirely on the workplace.

[oblio]

Yeah. I've worked in multiple places in Europe and people except you to bring a cake or something.

They might pitch in and buy you a small present, in return.

But they definitely expect you to bring a cake or at least some sweets.

[Reason077]

In that case, I'd be trying to keep my birthday a secret!

[pedro596]

I'm from Europe and in my past job my team had the tradition of having cake bought or baked by the guy celebrating his birthday.

[function_seven]

As far as I know it's not a thing here, either. I've known one or two that do, but in my experience the vast majority of people will celebrate their birthday on the nearest weekend, if they do so at all.

[fogihujy]

It does happen in Europe too; It's more of a personal preference than an actual thing, though.

[petercooper]

It's debatable whether the UK is "in Europe" but all my employees take their birthdays off, as does my wife. It seems to be hugely common here. I don't do it though because I just don't see the point.

[heyoo]

Dane here. Also never heard of this.

People often bring cake to work on birthdays, though.

[mschuster91]

Depends on where in Europe you are and how much the people you know value getting wasted or stoned. Personally, I prefer taking off at birthday + 1 day after.

[ariejan]

Well, I do. So there's at least one of us.

Then again, I grew up having my birthday in the "herfstvakantie" and the habit kind of stuck :-)

[collyw]

Some people do. I wouldn't say its the norm, but maybe one in five people do it in my anecdotal experience.

[markus92]

Dutchie here, most of my colleagues do.

[jahller]

German here: I always try to take a day off. Not as a rule in general, just a personal preference.

[watwut]

Never seen anyone to take a day off on birthday. Living in Europe too.

[lmilcin]

The question is, are surgeons that are likely to work on their birthdays any different from the ones that would take day off.

[esquire_900]

You make a good point, though I'd like to add that one would expect 1/365 = .274% of procedures to be on a random day (like a birthday). .21% is not so far off that it can't be random chance.

[eCa]

That, and since most planned surgeries ought to take place Mon-Fri, if anything it’s a higher percentage than I would have expected.

[Dylan16807]

Day of the week cancels out.

[ChrisLomont]

> .21% is not so far off that it can't be random chance

How far off exactly would it need to be before it can be random chance?

[esquire_900]

Interesting question, wondered that myself as well. My statistics are a little rusty, so doing a quick simulation shows that the range is about .25-.29 (code sample 1). However, things like operations aren't completely random, and you might be more correct by looking at something like a Poisson process, resulting in a range of about .14-.44 for this sample size (code sample 2).

All in the end to be taken with a grain of salt of course, as the planning component of operations eliminates most statistical properties :)

``` operations = np.random.randint(0, 365, 980000) pd.Series(operations).value_counts().sort_values() / 980000 ```

``` x = np.random.poisson(.0089, 1000000) x = (pd.Series(x).cumsum() / 24).round() x.groupby(x).count().iloc[:365].sort_values() / 980000 ```

[wjnc]

They included fixed effects for hospitals and surgeons: "To test whether our findings were affected by including both hospital and surgeon fixed effects in the same regression models." [1]

Perhaps the link could be changed to the paper itself?

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381

[throwawaylolx]

>Perhaps the link could be changed to the paper itself?

Especially since OP's link won't load.

[phreeza]

They controlled for surgeon effects though, so I suspect the result would be similar.

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4381.full.pdf

[tinus_hn]

If they didn’t change the schedule at all, 100/365 percent of all surgeries would be on the surgeons birthday. Which is 0.27%.

Put another way, assuming a flat distribution, on any given day 980876/365 = 2687 surgeries happen. While apparently on their birthday it’s 2064.

Saying ‘only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their holidays’ is a strong exaggeration. It’s about 75% of surgeons.

[randomsearch]

No just "interesting" be essential - without it this is junk science.

[kkoncevicius]

Yeah I mostly agree, was trying to be polite.

[phreeza]

They included a surgeon control variable in their model.

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4381.full.pdf

[Aissen]

Yes, they say they did all this (and much more) in secondary analyses. I'm curious how does one find the eTables supplementary information ?

Edit: nevermind, found it: https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/suppl/2020/12/09/bmj.m4381.D...

Edit 2: it looks like solid, peer-reviewed research

[randomsearch]

Ah, couldn't access the page so had assumed parent was correct reporting that they hadn't done this control. Sorry for getting that wrong - won't trust similar posts in the future.