[complex1314]

If your're most interested in blog posts google translate is great for exotic languages.

But for the data they're all there in English [0].

And if you're after methodology, analysis or understanding medical data, they follow WHO standards and publications are all in English on pubmed.gov [1] for the explicit purpose of international collaboration (which is the norm in medicine and public health for most developed nations).

[0] https://www.ssb.no/a/en/histstat/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24780982/

[roenxi]

I applaud the enthusiasm but I'm not that interested in Norway's medical system. I'm making a point about the larger issue of using foreign data. I spend a lot of time arguing with people on the internet for fun and education; and it is extremely common to get a cheerful comment which - after a few hours of investigation - appears to be an incorrect interpretation of data.

It is hard enough to do for systems that are part of the English speaking world or big, easy to track metrics. It is substantially harder to do for fiddly data series from foreign systems where the primary source material is in a different language.

> And if you're after methodology, analysis or understanding medical data, they follow WHO standards and publications are all in English on pubmed.gov

This goes to the main point - if it turns out that they don't follow WHO standards in an area or there is critical data not on pubmed.gov, what is the expected path for finding that out?

Because in English I have a much better chance of being able to figure that out. The countries are familiar and there is a better chance that the criticisms of the major institutions are well known. In a Norwegian context that already rather challenging task is even harder.

EDIT

An example occurs to me a few minutes later; there was an interesting theory that Japan had a lot of old people because there were unusually strong pension & tax incentives to lie about elderly relatives being alive when they were in fact dead.

The Japanese stats office could be following WHO standards and publishing all their information on pubmed.gov and the series would still be incomparable with other countries if there is an unusual incentive for the stats to deceive coming form an unexpected angle.

Keeping on top of that sort of thing in foreign legal systems is simply hard.

[complex1314]

For the point of arguing with strangers, yes, I agree that neither PubMed nor any other entities will provide you with what you need. I don't think that it is possible to acquire an understanding of an issue without some domain knowledge, at least on how to get the data.

But to gain a deeper understanding of the flaws of any country's health (or any) system, there is no way around that except by comparing it with data from other countries. And that might be hard, which is why professionals spend a lot of time on it.