Why cosmetic demand will never be satisfied

Summary Waiting lists are Byzantine in nature and poorly understood. This commentary attempts to show how complexity itself is difficult to encapsulate and therefore why it is that attempts to reduce waiting lists are a little like trying to capture falling water. Starting with an apparently trivial problem borrowed from game theory I would like to traverse maths, economics and medicine in an attempt to generate a picture of waiting lists that transcends present‐day dogma and cuts to a more realistic, and at the same time intangible, representation of the core problem.