Lots of opportunities to get up close and personal with humanity’s vagaries in a hospital.
A small example is the health questionnaires patients have to fill out before being admitted for their elective surgeries.
The first section asks them to input their height and weight. Nothing much subjective about that, you would have thought. Objective facts, surely.
Not so. Women will reasonably often write a number that is less than what gets measured when they arrive at the hospital. On the other hand, men, especially older ones, have a tendency to overestimate their weight, as if they can deny age related sarcopenia by sheer force of will.
It seems that people have idealised version of themselves in their head that they think is nearer reality than it actually is. It’s not often we get faced with unavoidable cold hard facts that contradict this happy delusion. I’m not sure we’re doing anyone any favours confronting people about this, though. The discrepancy is rarely more than a few kilos either way. It’s the admitting nurses who actually weigh the patients on arrival, I wonder what reactions they see from people when they find out the truth?
