Baseball trumps ER

A nail-biter of a baseball game might be all it takes to cure minor ills, at least temporarily. New research shows that visits to the emergency room plunge during key games.

“We saw amazing drops in visitation to ER departments in Boston when the games were really important, like Game 7 [of the American League Championship with the Red Sox] against the Yankees,” says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who led the study with colleague Ben Reis.

Studying hourly visit rates at six Boston-area emergency departments and the Nielsen rating for each game of the 2004 American League Championship Series and World Series, they found that emergency room visits were actually higher than average during the lowest-rated games, such as Game 3 of the league championship when the Red Sox were losing to the Yankees. But when the Sox made their comeback in Game 4, ratings soared for the last three championship games and ER visits dropped 5% to 15%.

“There is a real discretionary component to people coming into the ER department,” says Brownstein. “If the illness isn’t severe, they’ll probably wait until the next day to get healthcare.”

The findings were reported in the October issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine.