Dr. Death Sheds Light On Dying : Research: Death certificates provide data base for UCSD sociology professor David Phillips, who examines when people die.

Timing is everything.

David Phillips, a UC San Diego sociologist, studies when people die, and whether their mental state allows them to either prolong life or hasten death.

He has studied whether Jews are more apt to die after Passover. He has analyzed whether elderly Chinese women are more likely to die after the Harvest Moon festival.

Most recently, the professor examined whether Californians tend to die before or after their birthdays. And let’s not forget his earlier work scrutinizing whether people were more likely to kill themselves after reading about suicides of famous people.

“Why do I study death?” mused David Phillips over a cup of tea made from tree bark. “When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said, ‘That’s where the money is.’ Why do people drill for oil in Texas? That’s where the oil is.”

Phillips, one UCSD official said hesitantly, is “a little eccentric. Yes, definitely eccentric.”

Phillips, 49, has worn Birkenstock sandals every day for the last five years, except the time he went to a funeral. Though his office has a magnificent view of the ocean, he keeps the beige, stained curtains closed. And for a man who studies death, he has a bubbling enthusiasm for life and learning.

He gardens, rides horses in the hilly backcountry, and is polishing his German because he loves reading detective novels in German. He builds the 18th Century-style cabinets that his wife designs. He once suggested to his students that he would tell them one false thing in every lecture--so they would be forced to be skeptical. (A suggestion they heartily vetoed).

Phillips is an unlikely and quirky figure to be wooed by national television networks, newspapers and radios worldwide. And yet they do. A prolific researcher, he is inundated by calls about most of the studies that he publishes. On principle, Phillips declines most interview requests.

Principle? Only the printed word counts, Phillips believes (though he does have a soft spot for public radio). So he grants interviews very selectively.

Last week, Phillips published a study on birthdays that showed women are more likely to die one week after a birthday than any other week of the year, and men are more likely to die two or three weeks before their birthday.

The study, based on 2.7 million deaths, was the first of its kind to show a gender difference caused by significant personal occasions, such as holidays and birthdays.

“The birthday seems to function as a kind of lifeline for women. But for men it seems to function as a kind of death-line,” said Phillips, animatedly gesturing with his hands.

Among women, there were 3% more deaths in the week after a birthday than would be expected in a normal week, according to the study, published in this month’s issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, the Journal of the American Psychosomatic Society.

Like much of Phillips’ work, colleagues greeted it with mixed reactions.

“It is important in that it validates an idea which has been on the fringes of acceptance for some time,” said David Jenkins, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston. “It also illustrates that there is a lot more to living and dying than what you can find in a blood test or electrocardiogram. There are other things going on besides the strictly biological stuff that doctors and hospitals measure.”

Others, however, questioned Phillips’ research methods and whether he went too far with his conclusions--a criticism that some sociologists have previously voiced in published critiques of his work.

“I would hazard a hunch that if you ran the same kind of analysis on small children that you would find the same set of results,” said one researcher, who requested anonymity. “There is an absence of confirming evidence in his work.”

Phillips, however, prides himself on the solidity of his work and his large research data base: the California computerized death certificates compiled from 1960 to 1990 and the equivalent information for the United States.

In fact, the large data base provided by death certificates is one reason why Phillips studies death.

“Most research ideas turn out not to be correct, and if you don’t have a way to discard quickly, you end up spending time searching in barren fields. If you are able to sort ideas slowly, the temptation is to believe any idea you have must be a valid one,” Phillips said.

French chemist Louis Pasteur said perseverance was critical to his scientific breakthroughs. English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton attributed his successes to his ability to work longer than others on a problem. Phillips, however, believes that his accomplishments come from his ability to discard ideas that simply don’t hold up under scrutiny.

“The art of research is being able to know how long to keep trying and learning how to be as skeptical of your own ideas as you are of others’,” Phillips said. “Part of the skill is thinking of alternative ways, temporarily putting aside your favorite explanation.”

With the birthday study, for instance, Phillips speculated that the increase in women’s deaths after their birthday could be attributed to people postponing potentially life-threatening surgery until after their birthday.

Since a death certificate indicates whether a person had an operation, Phillips eliminated all those who had surgery before dying. He also eliminated people whose birthdays were near holidays.

He concluded that women were more likely to die in the week after their birthday and that men were more likely to die two to three weeks before their birthday. Phillips believes the difference is due to traditional gender roles. In the weeks before a birthday, men and women tend to evaluate their lives, weigh their accomplishments and failures.

But because men tend to peg their self-esteem to the workplace and because that can often be a frustrating environment, they view their birthdays with more ill feeling and a sense of having fallen short of their goals, he said.

In previous studies, Phillips found that Jewish deaths dipped 31% before the Passover holiday and peaked by the same amount just afterward. Among elderly Chinese women in California, similar results were seen with their Harvest Moon festival, a celebration in which the oldest woman in the family directs younger women and serves a holiday meal.

So Phillips chose to look at birthdays to see if a similar pattern would emerge for the general population. The timing of death has been a persistent theme in Phillips’ work.

He also studied the effects of 38 news broadcasts about suicides from 1973 to 1979 and found that the number of teen-agers killing themselves increased 7% in the week after the broadcasts. He analyzed crashes of small aircraft in which more than one person was killed and found the incidents increased after newspaper stories about murder-suicide cases.

“Many people say I must be preoccupied with death. I say I study it because I have high quality of data. . . . The best quality data is on death,” Phillips said. “When you study death, certainly it is different from visiting the bedsides of the dying.”

But for a brief moment, Phillips softened, saying quietly, “I am now learning how to feel some of this pain. I have been studying suicide and I never thought of the pain. Now I am able to feel the people behind the statistics. It is an accomplishment for me.”

As though to quickly cover his emotion, Phillips explained by citing an Amish saying: “We grow too soon old and too late smart.”

“In my case, I am finally getting smarter as well as older,” he said.

One example of his maturity, he said, is his dealings with the press. Television and radio reporters, however, didn’t stand a chance last week. During a two-hour interview, his phone rang almost every 20 minutes.

Although Phillips’ most recent study whipped up a hurricane of interest, he agreed to speak only to California newspapers and the New York Times. He spoke to California papers because he believes the taxpayers are entitled to know what they pay for. And he spoke to the New York paper because he has carefully analyzed the number of citations in subsequent scientific journals that result from an article in the prestigious newspaper.

“Experience shows it is only the written press that makes a difference. Nobody says ‘Please send me a reprint, I heard you on the radio,’ ” he explained.

With the mischievous gleam of a schoolboy confessing to smoking a cigarette, Phillips confided that he has appeared on a Larry King talk show--principles be damned.

And once Phillips did agree to appear on “Good Morning America,” but that was--he explained quickly--because they agreed to pay the expense of flying him to New York to film the television show and then to Washington, so he could visit the Library of Congress.

But when Time magazine sent a photographer several years ago, Phillips refused to have his picture taken, saying: “I don’t understand how a picture will aid in the transmission of this information.”

A trim man with gold-rim aviator glasses, Phillips frequently illustrates his points with jokes and stories, sometimes drawing from his exchanges with his two daughters, a high school senior and a college student. Many times, he is the butt of his own tales.

When his eldest daughter, Rachel, was 8, Phillips read to her biographical sketches by Winston Churchill. One was about a lawyer who had a mind that opened and shut with “the smooth precision of the breech of a gun.”

After reading that passage, Phillips paused. “She knew I wanted her to say ‘Yes, Dad, and your mind, too, opens and closes with the smooth precision of the breech of a gun,’ ” he recalled. “She said ‘No, Dad, I think your mind opens and closes more like the mouth of a goldfish.’ ”

Phillips cherishes the recollection because his daughter--while being sassy--also demonstrated her ability to be skeptical and independent.

“That is what I look for,” he said smiling, “the ability to say, ‘It ain’t necessarily so.’ ”