The most male and female reasons to end up hospital | Hacker News Reader

The most male and female reasons to end up hospital

leobenedictus.substack.com

86 pointsspeckx69 comments

Who on earth are those 1.7% men who go for "obstetric and gynaecological devices"?

Are they accompanying their wives, end up fainting during the procedures, hit their heads and have to be patched up?

Babies. 8% of the patients under that category are Age 0

Edit: the full billing code is "Obstetric and gynaecological devices associated with adverse incidents" Billing code Y76 "describes the circumstance causing an injury, not the nature of the injury."

So injuring a baby during delivery with forceps would result in this code.

They might be trans.

That's also my guess, and specifically: if you're a trans man with a uterus, odds are high that you'd like to get it removed. Therefore hysterectomy, therefore hospital.

Who the hell flagged my comment?

Trans people exist and are people too.

> 89.5% Psychological problems [for women]

This is a pretty stunning statistic to me. I suppose if you were to ask me to guess which gender is hospitalized the most frequently for mental health reasons, I'd probably guess women... but I wouldn't expect the distribution to be that extremely skewed.

Is there a simple explanation for this?

They are more likely to seek help?

Men are over represented in prisons and the homeless population. Maybe they don’t seek help.

Men are also over represented in suicide.

1 in 4 Women are on antidepressant by age 50.

It's a silent epidemic when you look at mental health rates and it appear to be getting worse.

There's also a follow up that has full data in a spreadsheet like thing:

https://leobenedictus.substack.com/p/that-hospital-admission...

Given the 100% on things that can only happen to female bodies, I'm surprised there is no counterpart for stuff that can happen only to the male body, like torsion of testicles. Maybe there is no dedicated code for that?

“In which some stereotypes are resoundingly confirmed” - so the post is confirming stereotypes of differences between women and men by highlighting the extremes in difference (not the actual counts)? It’s misleading. The gender differences are less stark if you use better charts and don’t include activities that men literally can’t do (that’s not a “stereotype” that’s human anatomy).

Don’t plot rates and volumes in the same chart . A single entry is larger than nearly the remnants

Men, asymptotic to 100% factors, women absolute 100% factors.

Wondering if this is point author is trying to make?

The author actually addresses that - he hadn't even considered that pregnancy related issues would top the list.

I think this was just a fun exercise for a curious mind. I don't think it needs to have a point - it's not an essay.

who are these 2% of men who were hospitalized due to obstetrics or gynaecological devices?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062817>

Babies?

Penis implant?

Trans people exist

AFAIK the terms "male" and "female" are used to refer to sex, not gender identity by the NHS.

2% seems like too much for that.

Sooo does this mean that pregnant women definitely should not be doing roofing work or riding motorcycles?

Would that make them the humans most likely to go to a hospital?

No. As the author tries to make clear, these are not the most common causes to go to a hospital. They are the causes, however unlikely, that show the most gender bias. That is, if the sample had one single data point of some very uncommon cause, it would show up on the list as either 100% male or 100% female.

Also, probabilities don't work like that.

(This comment was made in jest, not a serious comment)

No, the list is of the most gender biased causes, others are much more common.

others pointed out the flaw in your interpretation but at the same time, being pregnant while roofing or riding does seem like a bad idea

Dear Females, are males riding bicycles wrong?

Thanks

PS: Female and male riders had this year nasty crashes in our club :(

At least in my neck of the woods, road cyclists skew heavily male, I'd guesstimate 90%. Probably even higher for occupations like UberEats/Doordash, which spend all day biking and are thus more at risk of ending up in the hospital.

Update: looked up some stats/surveys, apparently cycling skews 75-80% male.

In the United States, males are known to be as stupid as a box of rocks when it comes to any sort of moving vehicle.

Male cyclists are much more prone to be doing 40mph wheelies down a blind hill in the middle of the road than woman.

Don't get me started on motorcycles, PA is just next store (we are over the border in NJ). PA doesn't require helmets for motorcycle riders, and many male riders happily throw helmets to the wind. The level of stupidity there is astronomical.

The helmet less riders are less likely to go the hospital, because if anything happens they are dead.

I assume more men mountain bike than women.

Some of these categories are awfully vague. "Non-treatment procedures"??

I interpreted that as "a procedure that does not treat a medical condition". So, possibly various non-doctor-ordered weight-loss-related procedures, cosmetic surgery, etc.

The spreadsheet in the follow up post gives the slightly rephrased "Procedures for purposes other than remedying health state". I think you're right, possibly including preventative surgeries as well.

My personal favorite would be the amusingly bureaucratic "Acquired absence of organs, not elsewhere classified". I'm also curious how 14 people were admitted as "victim of volcanic eruption" in England.

So basically never ride a motorcycle or a bike on the road.

So to summarize...

Men, stop riding motorcycles Women, stop having kids

That last one might have some detrimental effects long term though.

So while men are taking risks, women take one for the team

The article is careful to point out that these are not the most common reasons men/women wind up in the hospital. They are the reasons that have a very gendered split as to who experiences them. So even if men stopped riding motorcycles, there would not necessarily be a noticeable decrease in male hospitalization rates.

or conversely, if women would get up on that scaffolding and help out their man, that would disappear from the list.

because both would fall? :>

Quoting the article:

>I’m having to choose my words carefully, because I need to stress one thing: these are not the most common reasons for men and women to be admitted to hospital. They are the most typically male and typically female.

If you go to https://leobenedictus.substack.com/p/that-hospital-admission... and sort by number of admissions, you get stuff like:

- Personal history of certain other diseases

- Personal history of medical treatment

- Personal history of allergy to drugs, medicaments and biological substances

- Personal history of other diseases and conditions

What a ridiculously sexist thing to even dare say out loud. The most male-dominated category is "fall from scaffolding." Men aren't up there for fun.

They built the roof that shelters you and your family when it storms.

Aren’t we being a little sensitive?

The OP didn’t say all of the reasons for male related injuries were needless, but if you look at the list, it’s dominated by activities that are inherently voluntary and risky.

aren't you being a little naive by calling dangerous activities men have to take to survive "inherently voluntary"? go to a 3° world country or works as an immigrant somewhere rich to check your options. transportation included. it's easy to say one shouldn't use a cheap motorcycle and go for the one way sardine packed 2 hours bus ride across the city to reach work, everyday

Only 3 out of 18 reasons on that list are work-related, 2 maybe can be work related (lawnmowing and powered tools/household machinery?). I think cycling accidents (5 positions on the list) are in part normal cycling (like when riding to work) without rider's fault, and in a larger part taking unnecessary risks while riding, or riding for sport. And I'd guess motorcycle accidents (4 on the list) are mostly taking risks and riding too fast. 3 reasons are "assault". And that leaves only 1 reason from the list, sports equipment.

So out of 18 reasons on the list, only a small part is "activities men have to take to survive", but many of the others aren't "inherently voluntary and risky" or cannot be blamed on the hospitalized person. The list is too short to be really interesting, when half of that list is the same thing with small variations (cycling/motorcycling), and the same for women (mostly pregnancy).

This data reflects the UK, not a 3rd world country and my comments are restricted to this dataset.

Included in that same dataset are assaults and sports related injuries, which are additional risky activities.

You might argue assaults aren’t voluntary. My personal experience suggests most assaults are the result of voluntary activity rather than involuntary activity, YMMV.

I’m not being naive. I have lived in a 3rd world country where it wasn’t uncommon to see a family of 5 on a motorcycle.

I would note that you will tend to see, proportionately speaking, more women on motorcycles in those countries for the reasons you suggested.

>> So while men are taking risks, women take one for the team

I know you're joking but three of the top four are basically 'work related'. Men taking one for the team doing all the dangerous jobs.

And maybe if the men stop riding motorcycles the women will stop getting plastic surgery which is also shockingly high as a reason to end up in hospital.

This is probably the wrong chart for the comparison. The entire top section involves fewer total people than 3 separate 100% women related items on the bottom.

The follow-up article sorted by absolute numbers is a bit better suited, and predictably a bit more bland. Births is nearly in the top 10 though.

another thing: this article seems to presume "it's bad to be in hospital"

...but that's really going to mess up with general health policy (vaccination, checkup-visits, etc)

These things wouldn't be classified as hospital admissions.

There are other regular checkup stuff that does end up there depending on how it's filed. Heart imaging, mammograms, colonoscopies, etc.

"Supervision of normal pregnancy" seems to fall into this category, doesn't it?

I'm a little bit confused about what that is. If you are admitted to hospital for pregnancy and its not delivery (thats a different category that is far larger in absolute numbers) then something has gone wrong.

And herein lies the joys of medical coding :). Likely more than 235k normal pregnancy checkups happening in hospitals over 3 years in the UK, these "Z34" codes will likely get coded as admissions if someone is admitted for concerns around the pregnancy and the net result is everything with the pregnancy ended up fine. Maybe some other oddball scenarios I'm not thinking of too, but if you just go in for a planned pregnancy checkup and it comes out fine it (shouldn't) be coded as an admission just because it was done in a hospital location. Unless the NHS just has really odd coding practices, which is possible, but the other chart isn't drowning in 10s and 10s of millions of vaccinations of each type either.

For similar reasons you may find a ton of other things which aren't normally an admission in the data, but at numbers less than one might expect because that alone isn't usually reason to admit.

I'm glad I got out of healthcare IT!

Also worth noting that it is only looking at percentages. If you rendered the size of the blue and red bars based on total admissions, all you'd see is a bunch of red until you zoomed in very closely.

The pregnancy numbers are a policy and not related to accidents. It would be similar to say that children at age 3, 5 and 12 months are much more likely to end up in the hospital than other age groups, since those are the ages when they get vaccinations.

As with all statistics, there is some apple to oranges comparisons and some contexts that get lost.

Surely "admissions" does not include scheduled doctor's appointments?

Based on the data it seem it does.

"HES contains records of all admissions, appointments and attendances at NHS-commissioned hospital services in England."

One could limit the data to accidents and illnesses. Outcome of pregnancy would then not qualify unless there were complications.

WTF is "Procreative Management" ?

IVF-adjacent treatments, most likely.

IVF / Fertility services

Women: surgery to extract eggs

Men: wanking into a tube

A Dixie cup probably

I'm starting to think the person who handed me a bread bowl for this wasn't a doctor.

Wouldn't men show up a little bit more on the chart? I wonder if it's something more specific to women than just IVF.

Edit: I didn't mean any offense. I just didn't know what it meant!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com