Not every groin injury is as vicious as the one shown in the cartoon. And groin injuries can seriously affect women and children as well as men. For a small group of people of either sex and any age, they can permanently disable or even kill the victim. Here's a closer look, but with a warning: reading about the subject may cause you to wince or grasp private parts due to sympathy pain.
In exploring the painful topic of genital injury, medical researchers have recently found out that such problems are common (e.g., not limited to football!), and that many may be preventable.
The National Institutes of Health sponsored the largest ever study of major and minor injuries involving people's genitals. Dr. Benjamin Breyer, a urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, led the study team, which also included medical scientists from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The study (Bagga et al) appeared last week in The Journal of Urology.
The authors learned that genital injuries are twice as common as dental injuries, which may be sustained during some similar types of activity, and that most occur during the summer.
Study workers examined data from 100 emergency rooms throughout the country. About 16,000 people visit emergency rooms every year with injuries to the groin. Many more than this number are considered not serious enough to warrant an emergency visit, although serious symptoms may not appear until later. Most of the patients studied (about 70%) were men, whose injuries are more obvious because their genitals are external.
Sports injuries affect both sexes. Commonly, men also sustain zipper wounds or injuries when they slip into a split. The most common (and very recent) type of female injuries relates to cuts and/or infections caused by shaving or grooming the bikini area. Children often get hurt on the playground. Sexual abuse and accidents sustained in combat can also cause these problems.
Cuts and infections women get from pubic hair removal have quintupled five times between 2002 and 2010, according to a second report from the study team. It's fairly easy to attribute this type of problem to recent fashion trends that expose a lot of booty.
About 90% of patients studied were released from the emergency room after treatment. Dr. Breyer told Science Daily that the best ways to prevent such injuries may be consumer education and product safety measures like padded center bike rails, slip-free bath mats, and safer grooming techniques for bikini shaving.
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