Texting friends may be a sign that you’re on the road to recovery.
Every year at the big music festivals, people are moshed, crushed, stamped upon, faint, headbutted and all the usual fun that goes along with a really great day out. The problem has always been monitoring their recovery.
The human body is remarkably capable of recovering from injury, but the only way to tell if someone is actually compos mentis is the Glasgow Coma Scale
(Glaswegians, make your own jokes here), which is lengthy and hard to do with an unwilling patient.
Doctors at the music festivals have noticed one thing that recovered patients do really well, and quickly – texting their mates to tell them that they are all right.
Once there is enough neural activity to get the “psychomotor co-ordination” needed to text, the brain must be at a reasonable level of activity, according to Dr. Mike Sinclair, a retired anesthesiologist.
“Obviously, we did not check to make sure the texts made sense – but this might not be easy, given that many of them appear to make no sense at the best of times,” he said.
Whilst this may seem obvious, it does give a handy way of allocating limited resources quickly in an emergency situation. At a Rage Against the Machine gig in Reading this year, 142 people were treated in 90 minutes.
Dr. Sinclair has also theorized that busy accident and emergency wards could be sped up dramatically by this new criteria. Unfortunately, the cases of assault might also increase with all those mobile tones going off.
Source: BBC
Published: Dec 18, 2008 12:51 pm