Chest injuries are a leading cause of trauma deaths each year. Injuries to the chest may result from a wide variety of causes, such as motor vehicle crashes, falls, sports mishaps, and crushing or penetrating forces.
Chest injuries may involve the bones that form the chest cavity or the organs or other structures in the cavity itself.
Trauma has a far-reaching impact for every aspect of a patient's life. Trauma affects anyone who is traumatized, in addition to their family members.
Trauma is a practice of medicine that focuses specifically on the injured patient.
Trauma centers are important to have because having access to trauma centers improves the survivability and productive quality of life of traumatic injured people. Traumatic injuries are a leading cause of death in the US.
To receive a proper diagnosis of polytrauma, when you come into the emergency room (ER) doctors first go through the ABCs of emergency medicine. They check your Airway, your Breathing and your Circulation. They make sure that you have an airway that's protected and that you are breathing on your own. They will look for major injuries and make sure those injuries are taken care of. They make sure you don't have a collapsed lung and that you're not bleeding out. They will look at secondary injuries after that. Those are the main things that they are going to address first. Assuming all those things are okay, they'll look at things like extremity injuries and less life threatening injuries, to fully take care of a person with polytrauma.
Crush injury is essentially exactly what it sounds like. If something heavy falls on a person, it's going to cause a crush injury. Crush injuries that may be seen could be factory accidents or farm accidents, where a heavy piece of factory equipment or farm equipment cruches a hand or an arm.
