My girlfriend is a general practitioner and used to work as out-of-hours service doctor . She swore (and her collegues agreed) that full-moon nights and new-moon nights were the worst: much more cases, much more serious and with strange/deranged/dangerous people.
So we did a pseudo-statistic research, taking notes on number of patients and severity of the illness. On full-moon nights and new-moon nights there were:
- 40% more calls
- 20% more requests for urgent care
- 35% more requests from drunks, drugs addicts and mentally ill people
Also, the vast majority of situations in which occurred some form of verbal abuse, violence or sexual assault (always verbal thankfully, but other colleagues were not so lucky) happened on those nights or the day before or after.
This was a "research" lasted for a year, 3 nights per week. We asked to work on it for her PhD, but no other doctor was willing to take part in it, and my girlfriend was too horrified from her experience as a out-of-hours service doctor to keep going, so it kind of died here and there.
So we did a pseudo-statistic research, taking notes on number of patients and severity of the illness. On full-moon nights and new-moon nights there were:
- 40% more calls
- 20% more requests for urgent care
- 35% more requests from drunks, drugs addicts and mentally ill people
Also, the vast majority of situations in which occurred some form of verbal abuse, violence or sexual assault (always verbal thankfully, but other colleagues were not so lucky) happened on those nights or the day before or after.
This was a "research" lasted for a year, 3 nights per week. We asked to work on it for her PhD, but no other doctor was willing to take part in it, and my girlfriend was too horrified from her experience as a out-of-hours service doctor to keep going, so it kind of died here and there.