ER visit or baseball game?

Researchers from Boston Children's Hospital determined that the number of visits to hospital emergency rooms dropped significantly during important Red Sox baseball games. From New Scientist:

The researchers compared the number of visits to six emergency departments in the Boston area during 11 key baseball games in 2004 to the average number of visits on that day and at the same time in previous years, and plotted them against the number of TV viewers for those games.

A game against the New York Yankees, where the Red Sox’s victory guaranteed them a place in the US World Series, was watched on TV by 55% of the public in the greater Boston area, and coincided with a dip of 15% in emergency room visits.

But during another Yankees game, where it was taken for granted that the Sox would lose and only 30% of viewers tuned in, emergency room visits were almost 15% above average...

One explanation for the startling correlation is that while people are watching TV, they are sedentary and fairly safe. “People are at home watching the games so they are probably not getting into trouble,” explains (investigator John) Brownstein.

Another is that people who attend ER are often not experiencing a medical emergency in the true sense of the word.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8052