Trial reportThe British journal of oral & maxillofacial surgery2021
"Shh-don't say the Q-word" or do you?
Trial report in The British journal of oral & maxillofacial surgery, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 2 citations in OpenAlex.
- Elective arthroplasty on "high-risk" calendar dates: no evidence for worse outcomes in 43,000 procedures.Archives of orthopaedic and trauma surgery · 2026Article
- Superstition in arthroplasty: does a suspicious size or surgery date have a higher revision rate? A Dutch arthroplasty register study.Acta orthopaedica · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We aimed to assess the superstitious belief that saying the word 'quiet' during an on-call period in oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS) causes a disproportionate increase in workload. A two-armed, single-centre, randomised trial was performed in a single-blinded fashion within the OMFS department at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge. Duty on-call OMFS SHOs were assigned to a 'quiet group' or 'non-quiet group'. The former group was actively told that the on-call period would be 'quiet' whilst in all contexts in the latter this word was not used. Data were collected from 8am to 7pm from a period that spanned a total of 40 week-day on calls. The total number of bleeps was 491, the mean (SD) bleep count/day irrespective of treatment was 12.3 (4.6). The mean (SD) bleep count was 11.45 (4.15) for the control group and 13.1 (4.9) for the quiet (treatment) group. Welch's independent-sample t test identified no significant difference in the mean number of bleeps encountered between groups. Moreover, ANOVA identified no significant difference in the mean number of bleeps between days (F(4,35)=0.086, p=0.986). Statistical analysis was performed using R package version 3.6.2 (The R Foundation). Our study refutes the central dogma of all of medicine, which suggests that saying the word 'quiet' increases the clinician's workload during the working day. We identified no significant difference in the number of bleeps between different days of the week. OMFS sees a large breadth of presentations within the head and neck that requires a diverse set of skills to manage the varying presentations when on call.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.