[nath]

Originally Posted by production_coordinator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek

Here is a nice graph of the OECD information. It clearly shows that the US work nearly 120+ more hours per year than their UK counterparts.

I'm astounded that Spain seems to be putting in more hours than the UK.

I currently work for a very good company in terms of personnel practice; we're routinely told to go home by the boss if we're still there at 5:30. But many people I know - especially in London - are made to feel that their career won't progress unless they happily provide their services 'off the books' in the form of unpaid overtime.

Sod that - especially if the only reward is the ability to pay for private healthcare that doesn't work!

[production_coordinator]

Originally Posted by nath

I'm astounded that Spain seems to be putting in more hours than the UK.

I currently work for a very good company in terms of personnel practice; we're routinely told to go home by the boss if we're still there at 5:30. But many people I know - especially in London - are made to feel that their career won't progress unless they happily provide their services 'off the books' in the form of unpaid overtime.

Sod that - especially if the only reward is the ability to pay for private healthcare that doesn't work!

I do question how they come up with those numbers. I'm a "salaried employee" so they don't track my hours. It says 40 hours on my paycheck, but I don't work 40 hours. I average in the 45 zone...

[SimeyTheLimey]

dpdp

[SimeyTheLimey]

*Bump*

An interesting follow-up to our discussion. As you may recall, I expressed skepticism about whether some obvious factors had been controlled-for in this "study." In particular, I wondered whether most of the perceived statistical differences could be explained by differences in the rates of diagnoses of disease, not actual disease rates.

Well, according to the New York Times, my intuition was correct. The US screens for diseases more, and is somewhat quicker to to diagnose diseases.

The question of which country is healthier, Dr. Hadler and others say, turns out to be a perfect illustration of an issue that has plagued American medicine: the more health problems you look for, the more you find. And Americans, medical researchers say, are avid about looking.

The British, doctors say, are different.

"The U.K. has a tradition of independent and perhaps more skeptical primary-care practitioners who are probably slower to label and diagnose people and more reluctant to follow guidelines than their U.S. counterparts," says Dr. Iona Heath, a general practitioner in London. "I have heard it argued that the U.S. believes more in the perfectibility of humanity and the role of science than the Europeans."

Some people call it disease-mongering, says Dr. Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical School. She once calculated that if everyone had the recommended tests for blood cholesterol, blood sugar, body mass index and diabetes, 75 percent of adults in the United States would be labeled as diseased. And new diseases arise by the minute, she says, her favorite example being "restless legs."

Even cancer rates can be hard to compare from one country to another, noted Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, also of Dartmouth, and, with Dr. Schwartz, a researcher with the V.A. Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt.

Here, men over 50 routinely get a blood test for prostate cancer, the P.S.A. test, when they have medical exams. It is so accepted that some doctors do not even tell the men they are doing the test. Here, free skin-screening clinics pop up every year and doctors advise people to have their skin examined regularly for cancer. Here, women get mammograms starting at age 40, and they get them every year thereafter. Here, even thyroid cancer screening is on the rise.

And while screening picks up cancers that would become deadly if left unnoticed, in many cases it also picks up tiny cancers that might have gone nowhere — people would have died with them, not of them. Autopsies have repeatedly found that people often have such cancers, but had they been found through screening and treated, people would have thought they'd been "cured." That phenomenon, overdiagnosis, is a recognized consequence of increased screening, medical researchers say. A telltale sign is a cancer whose incidence rises but whose death rate does not budge.

The most recent example was with thyroid cancer. This month, in a paper in JAMA, Dr. Welch reported that the incidence of thyroid cancer in the United States had increased by 250 percent over the last two decades. But the death rate from it remained the same.

Screening is much less common in Britain, Dr. Heath says. For example, she said, "we don't do P.S.A. screening for nonsymptomatic men, and we don't do skin screening."

So, she and others say, perhaps it should be no surprise that even though smoking is much more common in Britain, and it is the leading cause of cancer, nearly twice as many Americans as Britons — 9.5 percent — said they had had cancer. And the more educated Americans reported the highest rates — 10.5 percent.

As for heart disease, 50 percent more Americans than Britons say they have it, and more say they have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. But when Dr. Marmot and his colleagues looked at actual measurements of blood pressure in British and American populations ages 40 to 70, there was no difference. And Americans had lower cholesterol than the British. The paper did not include actual outcomes from heart disease, like heart attacks. The one area where the Americans stand out is with a blood marker for diabetes. The paper reports that 6.4 percent of Americans had elevated levels of hemoglobin A1c, compared with 3.8 percent of Britons.

But the lesson for Americans is clear. These days, and especially in the United States, with its screening and testing, "we are labeled," said Dr. Hadler of North Carolina.

And so on.

Now, obvously, there is a certain amount of triumphalism here. It is nice to be proven correct, especially in the pages of "the enemy." But more to the point, this is a good illustration of why I am so sceptical of these kinds of reports. It simply is extraordinary how many screaming headlines saying how awful things in the US are turn out on closer inspection to be bunk. This is a good illustration.