Consider the evidence from a series of widespread doctor strikes in Los Angeles, Israel, and Colombia. It turns out that the death rate dropped significantly in those places, anywhere from 18 percent to 50 percent, when the doctors stopped working! This effect might be partially explained by patients’ putting off elective surgery during the strike. That’s what Craig Feied first thought when he read the literature. But he had a chance to observe a similar phenomenon firsthand when a lot of Washington doctors left town at the same time for a medical convention. The result: an across-the-board drop in mortality.
“When there are too many physician-patient interactions, the amplitude gets turned up on everything,” he says. “More people with nonfatal problems are taking more medications and having more procedures, many of which are not really helpful and a few of which are harmful, while the people with really fatal illnesses are rarely cured and ultimately die anyway.”
So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.
- Super-Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)
- Page 81
