The first edition of Rewriting the Rules stated, at its line 1011, that 'it is estimated that for every ten doctors trained in Syria, fewer than two remain'. It named no source at the line, and no source has been found for it.
Claim ID
AN-001
Exact or summary claim
The first edition of Rewriting the Rules stated, at its line 1011, that 'it is estimated that for every ten doctors trained in Syria, fewer than two remain'. It named no source at the line, and no source has been found for it.
Destination
Author's Note; and the correction is the twin of INTRO-008
Status
SUPPORTED
Source
The published first edition at its line 1011 for the quotation; SRC-310 and SRC-311 for the two candidate sources, both opened and both negative
Source type
Primary, the book being corrected, plus two opened candidate documents
Published
2025-10-21
Accessed
2026-08-20
Measure and scope
THE SCOPE OF THE ABSENCE, AND IT IS THE POINT OF THIS ROW. Searched on 20 August 2026: (1) the first edition itself, for any attribution at or near line 1011, and for any health-workforce percentage anywhere, using '70 per cent', '70%', 'health workforce', 'healthcare workers', 'doctors have left', 'medical staff', and any percentage within 120 characters of health, medical, doctor, physician, nurse or healthcare; (2) THE FIRST EDITION'S OWN REFERENCE LIST, roughly ninety-eight entries at its lines 1951 to 2148, of which exactly two bear on the Syrian health workforce; (3) both of those two, in full and in their true form: SRC-310, Kallstrom and others in BMJ Open, 8 pages, and SRC-311, Physicians for Human Rights, the 32-page report and not the landing page. Zero hits in either; (4) external discovery in English and Arabic, the phrasings being 'for every ten doctors' with 'fewer than two remain'; Syria doctors trained 'two in ten' or '20 percent' remain physician retention; and نسبة الأطباء سوريا لم يبق / بقي من كل عشرة أطباء هجرة الأطباء. NOT SEARCHED, and named because an absence is only as wide as its vocabulary: subscription medical databases, Arabic print sources not indexed by the search used, and the first edition's non-health references.
Known conflict
ADJACENT FIGURES EXIST AND ARE NOT THIS ONE. The external search surfaced reporting that roughly one quarter of the 30,000 doctors practising in Syria in 2010 remained in 2020, which is about 2.5 in ten and not 'fewer than two', and reporting that more than 70 per cent of the health workforce left, which is a different population. Neither is cited by the first edition and neither is offered here as its source.
Specialist
No
Downstream
The Author's Note correction paragraph. Chapter 7 is NOT downstream: it never discusses doctors trained in Syria, and its three estimates measure the health workforce, healthcare workers and highly qualified medical personnel.
Action
OPENED BECAUSE THE authors-note v4 DIFF REVIEW MADE IT BLOCKING, at BL-1 and BL-2. The v4 sentence said 'I cannot now find one' with no scope stated in the sentence and the scope left in a basis field, which the reader never sees; and the absence had been concluded without opening the two candidate documents. Both are now discharged: the documents were retrieved and read, and the sentence carries a one-clause scope with a pointer to this row, which is the INTRO-008 construction the reviewer identified as the settled answer to this exact question.