Is Friday the 13th bad for your health?
Today feels like an appropriate day to re-visit Atul Gawande’s essay delving into the body of research on what Friday the 13th looks like in the hospital:
It turns out there is one reputable study that has tried to assess whether or not luck actually does go bad on Friday the 13th. (I’m not sure which is more surprising: that someone actually spent time researching this or that I could find only one such study. This is, after all, a world that has studied even how chewing gum distributes saliva around the mouth.) The 1993 study, published in the British Medical Journal, compared hospital admissions for traffic accidents on a Friday the 13th with those on a Friday the 6th in a community outside London. Despite a lower highway traffic volume on the 13th than on the 6th, admissions for traffic accident victims increased 52 percent on the 13th. “Friday the 13th is unlucky for some,” the authors concluded. “Staying at home is recommended.” How you escape the bad luck at home they didn’t explain.
Even more research exists on the relationship between full moons and an increase in incidents of self-poisoning. Outside of hospitals, there’s some evidence that Friday the 13th might not be so bad: Business Insider finds that the stock market actually performs slightly better on such days, although admits the connection is most likely a spurious one.
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