Hockey Is Healthy For Canadians

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Hockey may be rough on the players - especially when Stanley Cups and Olympic medals are on the line - but doctors say big games keep Canadians out of harm's way.

Visits to emergency rooms in Ontario dropped by 17 per cent during the Olympic men's gold medal hockey game in Vancouver last year - the most popular TV broadcast in Canadian history, doctors reported Monday.

While it is too early to know if the Canucks' Stanley Cup run is having a similar impact, doctors suspect it likely is.

"We are studying that now," says Dr. Donald Redelmeier, an emergency physician at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, home to Canada's largest trauma centre.

He says he was amazed by the impact the 2010 Olympic hockey game had on Sunnybrook's ER, "3,000 kilometres away from the action" in Vancouver.

To see if his Toronto experience was a "fluke" or part a general phenomenon, he and his colleagues at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences looked through Ontario's emergency room records.

They compared the number of patients arriving at emergency departments across Ontario during the gold medal broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010, with the number arriving during the same hours on six control days.

There was "a significant reduction in hourly rate of visits during the broadcast," they report in a study published in the journal OpenMedicine.

During the game, 647 patients per hour visited emergency departments compared to 783 patients on a normal Sunday.

Men in rural locations were less likely to head to the hospital during the game.

Redelmeier says there was no increase in ER visits before or after the game.

"For all practical purposes," he says the ER visits "just disappeared."

He says several factors were likely at play including that viewers - unlike the hockey players getting slammed in the boards - were out of harm's way.

"The time you are watching television you are not outside playing football, breaking your arm, spraining your ankle or whatever," Redelmeier says.

And some people who might normally have headed to emergency with stomach pains or shortness of breath likely decided to put it off until after Canada beat the U.S. And by then, he says, they were feeling better.

"Many illnesses are self limiting by their nature," says Redelmeier. "After a few hours you just don't feel as bad as you did initially."

He says the study did find one notable exception that suggests hockey can be heart stopping.

There was an increase in the number of serious cardiac emergencies during the gold medal game when Sidney Crosby scored in overtime, winning gold for Canada

"It could be because of the excitement, or because people forget to take their afternoon or evening doses of beta blockers (used to treat heart disease)," Redelmeier says, adding that "alcohol or lifestyle indiscretions" may have also contributed to the increase in cardiac emergences.

Read more: Visits to ER decrease during a big game: study

Looks like they better have a Heritage Classic after all.

 

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Ray Lewis said if there is no Heritage Classic this year, crime rates will soar...

 

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Ray Lewis gonna kill a brotha