Looking at “ER trips due to damaged bones and joints in my 6th-grade class,” let’s see…
there’s one guy who had a twisted ankle (that’s all the diagnosis we got),
a girl with a badly-contussed wrist (i.e., the mother of all black-and-blues, on her wrist),
38 students whose greatest damage was a broken nail,
and one who barely went one week without something in a cast, and occasionally two things at the same time (that was a fun couple of weeks). We’re now 41 and he has never again had a broken bone, but that year we were starting to call him “Jigsaw Man.”
Modern medicine didn’t exist, but people have been performing surgery and splinting bones for milennia.
I’ve been to the emergency room for myself about a dozen times that I can remember, maybe a little more. Most were sports related - too many were just stupid related. I had some problems as a baby that I don’t remember that would run that score up a little. For my wife and kids maybe 6 or 8 more times.
I’ve had enough operations that I have strong opinions on anesthetics.
A commentary on statistics - the “average” person has one breast and one testicle.
What is an emergency? Many of the examples cites were not life threatening, and probably would have not done any serious damage if the person just patched them up and/or rested for a while.
The problem is, we treat hospital emergency rooms as after-hour walk-in clinics. (Or as I-don’t-have-a-doctor walk-in clinics). The statistics are going to be skewed by this. Real, call-an-abulance type emergencies are probably much rarer.
There was an interesting study, I think I saw it in one of Gladwell’s books (What the Dog Saw or was it Outliers?) They looked at the homeless people of New York, and a small number - maybe a few hundred - cost the medicare system a few million apiece. they were the ones with failing kidneys and poor immune systems, who would develop pneumonia, or get drunk and be hit by a car, or just fall down, and end up in intensive care repeatedly until they finally did themselves in.
Another stat for the Candian medicare system, is that 80% of all spending on patients is typically in the first or last few weeks of life. While I’m not advocating tea-bagger-shaped death panels, certainly there’s some dignity in not performing extraordinary measures if the end is a foregone conclusion. A few extra weeks with tubes down your throat is not “quality of life” even if it is life.
Your thread title bothers me. It implies childbirth is an emergency of some sort. Normal childbirth is not a medical emergency, and most births are normal.
Now, if you said “hospitalizations” that wouldn’t bother me so much. Just a quibble. Resume thread.
It depends a lot on what you consider “emergency medical treatment.” Life-threatening illness/injury only?
Taking all of the items listed in the OP, everybody in my family has had at least one.
Without going into tedious detail, we’ve all had situations where we were treated in an emergency room for something that might have been serious but turned out not to be.
I excluded childbirth because it is a (generally) planned and expected medical issue, unlike broken bones or appendicitis or strokes which can strike randomly.
One trip, when I was 5. Head trauma. Baseball bat. Turns out there are places to not stand when your brother is batting. Nothing major though. A minor concussion and LOTS of blood.
It seems to me that the number would be at least one for everyone, since I would classify anything that causes death as a medical emergency, and everyone dies eventually.
I’m wondering why the OP includes “elective surgery.” Does that mean surgery that doesn’t really need to be done immediately, or doesn’t need to be done at all?
As someone who is currently working in a Paediatric ER and who has worked in a an adult ER- I think you need to define precisely what you mean by “emergency”.
Case in point- many cancer patients will never have a situation between diagnosis and death where they are rushed into the ER in an ambulance. A change in bowel habit, an elective colonoscopy after a few days, a diagnosis of advanced inoperable bowel cancer and death in a hospice a few months later- no “emergency” there, but someone still dies.
Or what about a child with a febrile seizure which self-terminated at home- parents call the ambulance- blue lighted to hospital. They are checked over, given Ibuprofen and allowed home shortly afterwards with a diagnosis of a viral illness. Treated as an “emergency”- but at no point was the child’s life in danger.
You certainly can’t classify by diease process or diagnosis as the same situation may or may not be a life-threatening emergency depending on the patient. You can have a miscarriage at 8 weeks and cope at home with OTC painkillers and some maxi-pads…or you could collapse with life-threatening bleeding and need emergency surgery and 15 units of blood transfused. Or, if you’d prefer another example, you could have a heart attack and walk around never finding out until your annual ECG- or you could be dead before you hit the ground.
20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, a percentage of which will require surgery.
About 15% of pregnancies are terminated- again, some surgically.
25% of all births are by c-section.
1 in 100 pregnancies is ectopic- requiring surgery in the majority of cases.
Women are admitted to hospital during their pregnancy as emergencies with life-threatening conditions (pre-eclampsia, diabetes, placenta praevia, placental abruption, hyperemesis).
Are you excluding just normal, uncomplicated vaginal deliveries that a woman chooses to have in a hospital (i.e. normal childbirth)- or all obstetric issues. For women of child bearing age if you exclude ALL pregnancy related hospitalisations, surgeries and emergencies your statistics would be so skewed as to be unrepresentative of reality.
Yep, no emergency visits for me, for any reason. I did have my wisdom teeth removed, but just at my regular dentist (no ortho or surgeon). I’ve never broken a bone; the few stitches I have had were due to either a tiny biopsy or my aforementioned wisdom teeth.
Female, 33, no kids. I’m either disgustingly healthy or the bill’s about to come due. I definitely fear the latter.