If you guessed days on the calendar closer to the weekend, you're a smarter, more observant health care consumer than most. Excluding patients admitted for emergency treatments or long stays, those entering a hospital on Thursday (6.3 days) or Friday (6.1 days) spent about a day longer there than people admitted on a Sunday (5.3 days), according to a study by the UK Institute for Public Policy Research.

The main reason for the delay: Streamlined or limited health care services offered on weekends due to short staffing, and nothing associated with a medical need, says the British health care think tank.

That said, being admitted Saturday (5.5 days) or Sunday was associated with the shortest hospital stays on the calendar. That's very interesting, considering another British study found Monday to be the most stressful day of the week, resulting in fatal jumps in blood pressure...

Another contributor to longer-than-normal hospital stays cited in the report: The presence of antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA, certainly within the control of the average health care worker.

And that's not taking into account at all the wacky ways conventional medicine operates, as in the sad case of a little boy and fish bone that took a battery of doctors more than two years to diagnose and treat correctly.