Question: Why do hospital gowns seem to be designed for maximum humiliation?
Answer: In civilized society, one of the general rules we use is: You have private parts. But a hospital is not part of civilized society. You check your dignity at the door. The hospital, in fact, wants you to be mortified, because this makes you all the more pliant and submissive.
The mortification starts when you are forced to undress completely, underwear and all, and put on a flimsy, non-heat-retaining garment that ties in back, sort of. If the hospital provides no slippers, you will have to wear your street shoes. What a sight you make: your gown, your peekaboo behind, your wing tips.
Well, if it's any solace, we've found out why the hospital gowns are so ridiculous. They're meant to be flimsy. Because that requires less fabric and costs the hospital less. It's the awful truth! So why do they open in back? Well, it's either that or the front. Choose your humiliation. (Sometimes it depends on the specific procedure.)
Kathy Bennett, spokeswoman for ATD-American Co., a hospital supplies manufacturer in Wyncote, Pa., says there are all kinds of gowns that hospitals can buy, and some cover the patient fully. There is, for example, the "3-Armhole Wrap-Around All Purpose Gown," which, according to the ATD catalog, is the "Ultimate in Modesty." But the cheapest gown is the "Center Back," meaning the one that ties in the center of your back with no overlapping fabric.
"The ones that open in the back are the most economical. Because there's the least to them," says Bennett.
Recounting her own hospital experiences, including being forced to wear high heels with a flimsy gown, she says that perhaps citizens should learn to be smarter consumers of hospital services.
"If patients started patronizing hospitals that offered more coverage, you'd better believe that the other hospitals would come around," she says.
You might start by asking if hospitals use "Overlapping Back" gowns, and if so, are they the ones with the 4-inch overlap or the 8-inch overlap. The heaviest gowns are made of "California weight," to meet the standards of that state. But regulations vary from state to state and institution to institution.
"The lowest standards, I would imagine, are for nursing homes and jails," Bennett notes.
The Mailbag:
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: The Why column does not make errors. What is also true, however, is that some individual columns are more FACTUALLY SUCCESSFUL than others. In the not entirely successful category we'd nominate our recent column on why left-handers die nine years younger than right-handers, which elicited a number of angry letters.
We said the research of Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern, showing that right-handed people die at age 75 on average and left-handers die at 66 on average, had not been universally accepted, but also hadn't been refuted. That's essentially correct, but we weren't aware of all of the criticisms of the Coren-Halpern research, notably in the letters column of the New England Journal of Medicine (right, how could we have missed that?).
The main argument against the perceived lifespan differential is that the statistics are skewed by the prejudice against left-handedness that existed 70 or 80 years ago. Children in those times, say the critics, were forced to be right-handed even if they were naturally left-handed. As a result, there aren't very many 85-year-old left-handers, compared to, say, the number of 25-year-old left-handers. This, in turn, creates a quirky situation: Lefties can appear to have a lower average age of death even though their risk of dying isn't any greater.
It's quite simple: All these 85-year-old righties and pseudo-righties that are wandering around are skewing the numbers on behalf of right-handedness. It might be true that righties, on average, live longer - but only because there are so many old righties!
Coren and Halpern, answering their critics in NEJM, say the alleged historical bias against left-handedness is contradicted by statistics. Thus, they write, "an analysis based on the mean age at death is completely justified," and they say their critics can't refute their observation that left-handers are nearly six times more likely to die of accident-related injuries.
Who's right? Hard to say. But for the moment we'll take the word of Marcel E. Salive, an epidemiologist at the National Institute on Aging, who told us, "The evidence points to right- and left-handed people having the same risk of death at any age."