An emergency room visit generally involves a marathon of physical pain and acute mental anguish, no doubt. But what if all those people were drunk? According to a recent UK study by Newcastle University health researchers, most of them are definitely trashed.
The study, conducted in Newcastle, found that over two-thirds of emergency room visits on weekends are "directly related" to downing alcohol, according to Ars Technica. "Traumatic injury was the most common reason for attendance," health researcher Kathryn Parkinson tells Emergency Medicine Journal, though "psychiatric problems" also accounted for a large amount of drunken ER visits.
Parkinson and her team looked closely at health records from a "local inner-city hospital" from the 2010 - 2011 year before conducting breathalyzer tests on admitted ER patients in 2012 and 2013. Alcohol-inspired ER visits stayed around 15 percent between 2012 and 2013, but that ratio made an astronomical leap on the weekends to a seemingly preposterous 70 percent. The majority of those admitted, researchers say, are "young men, arriving in the late night or early morning."
In short, the art of the turn-up is only truly mastered when one has avoided emergency room visits entirely. Instead of letting your obnoxious aunts push you to the brink of insanity this holiday season, maybe just drink with an eye toward hospital avoidance by keeping the turn-up at home.
