The authors suggest it is due to a reduced number of unnecessary treatments: >"Our results echo paradoxical findings documented during a labor strike by Israel

The authors suggest it is due to a reduced number of unnecessary treatments: >"Our results echo paradoxical findings documented during a labor strike by Israeli physicians in 2000, in which hundreds of thousands of outpatient visits and elective surgical procedures were cancelled, but by many accounts mortality rates dramatically fell during the year.27 Similar reports of decreased mortality during physician labor strikes exist elsewhere, with most hypotheses attributing mortality declines to lower rates of nonurgent surgical procedures.28" http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2038979 http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=20389... However, they do not seem to consider that mortality rates are seasonal and so are the meeting dates. The seasonality differs for different causes of death. A quick search came up with this for heart-related causes, so for example: >"When grouped by season, we observed the distribution of the 449 coronary heart disease fatalities to show a relative peak in winter (32%) and relative nadir in spring (21%)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3756551/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3756551/ What they should have done is plot mortality by week so we can see if there is a sudden dip around the conference dates.