Why are so many babies born around 8:00 AM? (2017) (opens in new tab)

Not the only reason. Time of year also matters a lot for more "natural" reasons. IIRC mid-September is the peak and it goes down on either side, so late December is going to be pretty low anyways. Then you add in C-Sections and it drops to the absolute bottom.

Tangent but it occurred to me the other day that it takes 9 years before one experiences a birthday on every day of the week. Over the course of a lifetime maybe the dispersal evens out but it seems like some of us are just destined to have more birthdays on the weekend.

I ran data for a call center. The day with the lowest volume was July 4th.

Is December 25th actually rarer than February 29th?

Alternatively, a reasonable medical system might err on the side of a few more not entirely necessary C-sections as opposed to more not entirely necessary maternal and baby deaths.

As a legacy of upright locomotion balanced with large cranium size and infant helplessness, humans have ended up with an objectively poor design for giving birth to offspring. Death during that process is “natural”.

Would have been a bit difficult to tell if my small hiatal hernia that occasionally causes scary heartburn had become an increasingly large hiatal hernia that allowed part of my stomach to slip through, requiring a much worse emergency surgery than my soothingly well-planned c-section, while in the middle of giving birth…

Not everyone giving birth is a fit 25 year old with absolutely no other health issues and a desire to have several more kids.

Tsk tsk all you like about women “waiting too long” - the majority of first-time mothers over 40 have c-sections. Would my child and I have survived a natural birth? Most likely. Would I definitely not have further damaged my diaphragm, debilitating me far more than the planned c-section did (hardly at all) at a point when we could least tolerate it? My gyno, my gastroenterologist, and I decided the c-section was a much better bet for both me and my child.

It's not like you have to wait till the last second to decide that natural birth will be too risky. With regular sonograms it's entirely possible to note when a baby is in a risky position (feet down, umbilical wrapped around the neck for example) and decide to schedule the c-section. If the baby moves into a proper position then the c-section can be cancelled, but if not they can avoid a lot of complications. Also, there are likely lower error rates from having a well planned and orderly procedure instead of emergency ones. The mother and baby could be in much danger if she needs an emergency procedure right at shift change.

Why is scheduling c-sections bad? I think it just reflects the reality of our society. First of all, people don’t seem to like giving birth. A vast majority of those who give vaginal birth get epidurals. Is that really preferable? Or is it preferable to writhe in unspeakable pain? Also, women are busy. Scheduling the procedure helps birth fit neatly into a chaotic life. Is that wrong?

Absolutely incorrect take. Also, irresponsible to spread this kind of nonsense when you are a public defender, and not remotely close to being a medical professional.

Fixed, I appreciate it!

Citation?

With all due respect your post sounds a little like a conspiracy theory without a set of good sources.

Is the claim that someone is evil even an intellectual position (versus, a religious one)? And finally but not facetiously, does being evil invalidates a technical statement they're making -- sounds like an ad hom?

checklist book was good

what has he done that’s bad?

"With the former you’d expect a normal distribution (not uniform) due to the central limit theorem"

You'd expect it, but in the real world you'd be extremely frequently wrong. Correlations in the real world very frequently end up defeating the central limit theorem in practice.

The central limit theorem, being a mathematical thing, is correct; it can't be "wrong". However, while adding together a lot of distributions will absolutely trend towards a normal distribution, it does not make very many promises about how "quickly" that will happen. In practice the real world is filled with the sort of pathologies that result in it being "very slow". Scare quoting some words here because they are rather vague in math terms and I feel bad about that, but putting real mathematical meat behind them would be beyond the scope of an HN post. Many, many, many things are not normal that "should" be, and you can make some grave mistakes in the real world if you overestimate the normality of real world distribution. I recommend Taleb's works here, if you need more details.

Yup, that's what I meant by "diurnal hormones". Personally I'd still guess there's an effect there, it's just so swamped by the c-section surgery nothing else is visible.

Nah, in completely socialized systems doctors and nurses also usually want to have weekends and evenings off, hospitals aren't staffed as well as during business hours, and people try to limit the workload on their colleagues remaining on duty.

Additionally, you're not supposed to eat before a C-section.

If you have yours at 8am, then your last meal was dinner, maybe 12-13 hours ago. If you have yours at 4pm, then you might not have eaten for 20 hours.

Surgeons usually prefer to start operating before 8AM. They are awake, the OR is clean, the staff is fresh, and they have all day afterward to monitor for complications (and jet out early if everything goes well). The worst surgery times are probably starting around 7PM and going until 6AM. Those are usually emergencies, the OR has been in use all day, the surgeon probably has less experience as they are earlier in their career, the preferred materiel might be waiting to be autoclaved, etc.

The surgeon is usually an OBGYN. At least that’s what’s most common at the hospital we had our 3 at. It was the attending OBGYN from the practice my wife goes to. They are both run by the same place.

Not sure how it works for small hospitals.

You have to remember that you are not the only patient in the hospital. A Caesarean section requires a lot of setup including OR, anesthesiologist, ensuring adequate care for the newborn, etc. Any of these can cause a delay. Of course there is other cases triaged by urgency like crash sections. It would make no sense to show up to the OR 30 minutes before you can begin operating. An elective Caesarean section will always get bumped for emergencies.

Hospitals and the medical profession have a lot of work, and for efficiency they stack the work up. A rule of thumb whenever dealing with a hospital is that everything will be massively later than you expect. It's a good idea to set your expectations ahead of time so that a bit of a wait does not take you by surprise. For a hospital procedure, half an hour late is pretty much right on time.

Congrats on the baby!

You have to register with the hospital. You have to change into a hospital gown. You have to get an IV and labs (which take an hour to come back). You have to do a nursing intake interview (which is surprisingly long).

I'm an anesthesiologist. My wife needed surgery. And the surgeon is a friend of mine from childhood and needed to leave that afternoon. We had a free OR. Even then, it took 2.5 hrs to get her registered, up to the surgical floor, and to the OR.

So, maybe that doctor is a jerk, but realistically, it takes a while even if you have the inside track on everything.

What exactly is the complaint?

File a grievance with a regulatory body.

but with inflation, 8:00 am in 2017 is now 7:30 am

What time zone?

Yes I have two kids one of which was delivered by c-section.

You are paying a lot of money to be in that hospital bed, you can tell them to pound sand and let you sleep. They will get pissy but I figured after what my wife went though having some nurses think I'm a asshole is the better part of the deal.

> You mean a generally-recommended-as-medically-necessary-only procedure that would result in far more complications were it not performed?

A Caesarean is often performed even when it is not medically necessary. Hence "why are so many babies born around 8:00 AM"? Additionally, above a certain rate in industrialized countries, they are not even associated with better birth outcomes.

> And anyway, people get surgeries all the time, how is this any different?

Because childbirth is not an injury or deformity that requires fixing (or any intervention) in the large majority of cases. Surgery should be done when medically necessary. A Caesarean has many potential side effects for the mother and the infant, and doing it just to hurry things up is (IMO) unethical.

In times and in countries the number of C sections have varied widely from "you might as well get it because it's quick and safe" to "nobody should have one unless they are literally carrying Julius Caesar".

And poking the "birth options bear" is not something you want to do unless you're really in for a fight. There are strong opinions available.