People land in the emergency room for all sorts of reasons: chest pain, a broken arm, dizziness. But Dr. Darnell Gordon, an emergency medicine physician at Howard University Hospital, told me that sometimes a condition requires some sleuthing.
Patients might feel embarrassed, he said. Or they think they’ll get in trouble.
So they lie, he said, or leave out information.
“We are not the police, and we’re not here to judge you,” Dr. Gordon explained. “So if you’ve ingested something, inserted something — anything that’s happened — let us know,” he said. “We’re probably going to find out anyway.”
Last winter, I wrote about things emergency room doctors wish you’d avoid, and many more E.R. doctors wrote in to tell me what I had missed.
So now I’m back for Round 2. Here are more tips to help keep you out of the hospital.
Never put your feet on the dashboard.
If you’re in the passenger seat of a car, it can be tempting to put your feet on the dashboard. But don’t do it — ever — said several doctors, including Ryan Gerecht, E.M.S. medical director at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Airbags deploy in less than one-twentieth of a second; when that happens, he said, you have no time to move your legs. The result, Dr. Gerecht said, is that “the knees and the hips and the legs can be forcefully pushed into your face, or strike your head, which can cause a traumatic brain injury.”
He has seen facial and leg fractures as well as hip dislocations. “We’ve even seen spinal cord injuries,” he said.
Don’t forget your eyes when doing yardwork.
An estimated 188,000 people show up in the emergency room each year with a “foreign body” in their eye. That’s about as pleasant as it sounds.
Dr. Chidinma Nwakanma, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at Penn Medicine, told me that many of the eye injuries she treated happened when people were doing yardwork or woodwork without safety glasses.
Any time there is a danger of a projectile coming toward your face — “basically yardwork in general,” Dr. Nwakanma said — you’re at risk for a severe eye injury. “I have seen people have to have their eye removed completely,” she added.
Patients will tell her that they were just trimming the hedges or cutting one piece of wood, Dr. Nwakanma said, but an injury can happen in only a second.
A simple pair of goggles goes a long way in terms of protecting your vision, said Dr. Aaryn Hammond, co-medical director of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist’s adult emergency department. “As much as it doesn’t look cool,” she said.
And never mow the lawn in open-toed shoes.
Dr. Ryan LaFollette, an emergency medicine doctor at the University of Cincinnati said that he had seen what happens when people cut grass in flip-flops. If you slip, he said, you could be looking at an amputation. Instead, he said, wear shoes with a closed toe.
And if you have a lawn tractor, don’t give young kids a ride on it with you, Dr. Gordon said, adding that accidents are routine.
Watch out for the front burner.
When cooking dinner, it’s natural to use the front burner. But, if you have small children, it’s best to keep boiling pots at the back of the stove, Dr. Gerecht said.
“A parent will be boiling water for pasta, they turn their back, and a little one will reach up there, grab the pot and pull it on top of them,” he said. “I wish no stoves had a front burner.”
Scald burns comprise over a third of injuries admitted to U.S. burn centers. However, 61 percent of these happen to children less than 5 years old.
If you’re choking, forget about privacy.
Choking is the fourth-leading cause of unintentional injury deaths. If you’re in a restaurant and you start choking, don’t run for the restroom, said Matthew Bitner, a clinical professor of emergency medicine at U.S.C. School of Medicine Greenville.
“We see that a lot,” he said. “People are looking at them, they’re coughing or gagging, so they get up from the table and they go to the bathroom.”
But there’s often nobody there to help, he said. If you’re choking in a public place, you want to create a scene. Make the universal sign for choking by placing your two hands over your throat, he said, and stay around other people so they can assist you.
Don’t take another person’s prescription medication.
It’s common for people to lend or borrow leftover antibiotics and prescription allergy medication, according to a review of the literature. But you and another person do not have the same medical profile, cautioned Dr. LaFollette.
Dr. Nwakanma explained: “You don’t know how you’re going to react.” Everyone’s bodies are different, even if you’re related, she added. You could have an allergy to the medication, for example. And if you’re self-treating at home, you can delay getting the care you need, she added.
Some doctors shared grisly stories with me (like what happens to your fingertips when you use a mandoline slicer without proper protection), but they told me in the hopes that people will think twice before they do something risky.
As Dr. Bitner said, the goal is for people to “spend less time visiting me in an emergency department.”
Get stronger knees with this workout.
Roughly one in four adults suffers from chronic knee pain. Try this exercise routine for healthier and more flexible joints.
Read the article: A Weekly Workout to Protect Your Knees.
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