November and December

I've noticed in several hospitals that the operating rooms get particularly busy in November and December. We have been operating at capacity, running nearly all rooms all day. Although I haven't looked at the data, the hypothesis is that many people want to squeeze in those elective surgeries before the year's end and their deductible resets. In addition, if one has to recover from surgery, it might as well be during the holidays. Perhaps surgeons are trying to make a little more money before the end of the year. I've always found these phenomena interesting: why deliveries happen more on weekdays than weekends, why pediatric surgeries happen more during summer breaks, and why November and December push our hospital capacity to the limits. Time feels like an artificial thing we've created, and medicine - whether rightly or wrongly - gets swayed by such external influences.