Stab wounds in a Swiss emergency department: a series of 80 consecutive cases.

Background: Interpersonal violence is a worldwide social reality which seems to increasingly affect even the safest of countries, such as Switzerland. In this country, road traffic accidents, as well as professional and recreational activities, are the main providers of trauma-related injuries. The incidence of penetrative trauma related to stab wounds seems to be regularly increasing in our ED.

Alcohol and cannabis use as risk factors for injury--a case-crossover analysis in a Swiss hospital emergency department.

Background: There is sufficient and consistent evidence that alcohol use is a causal risk factor for injury. For cannabis use, however, there is conflicting evidence; a detrimental dose-response effect of cannabis use on psychomotor and other relevant skills has been found in experimental laboratory studies, while a protective effect of cannabis use has also been found in epidemiological studies.

Methods: Implementation of a case-crossover design study, with a representative sample of injured patients (N = 486; 332 men; 154 women) from the Emergency Department (ED) of the Lausanne University Hospital, which received treatment for different categories of injuries of varying aetiology.

["Damage control surgery" (DCS): just the surgery the patient needs].

Surgery of trauma adds an insult which is proportional to the duration of the operative treatment. The aim of DCS is to prevent the onset of the fatal triad stopping the major bleeder. Treating the contamination, it also makes the Multiple Organ Deficiency Syndrome less likely.

Do Objective Measures of Blood Alcohol Concentrations Make More Sense than Self-reports in Emergency Department Studies?

Purpose: : Concerns about self-reports have led to calls for objective measures of blood alcohol concentration (BAC). The present study compared objective measures with self-reports.

Methods: : BAC from breath or blood samples were obtained from 272 randomly sampled injured patients who were admitted to a Swiss emergency department (ED).

[Acute abdominal pain: what about analgesia].

Acute abdominal pain tends not to be treated by surgeons and emergency physicians. However, literature has become clear that analgesics are effective and do not disturb clinical examination, diagnostic process and do not delay surgery. Thus, early treatment of acute abdominal pain is recommended.

Injury pattern of the Flash-Ball, a less-lethal weapon used for law enforcement: report of two cases and review of the literature.

Less-lethal weapons are used in law enforcement to neutralize combative individuals and to disperse riot crowds. Local police recently used such an impact weapon, the Flash-Ball, in two different situations. This gun fires large rubber bullets with kinetic energies around 200 J.