You've
heard how drunken people survive horrific accidents that should've killed
them. But it's not just folk belief - scientists revealed that the higher
the blood-alcohol level, the higher the chance of survival after a serious
injury:
"After an injury, if you are intoxicated there seems to be a pretty
substantial protective effect," said Lee Friedman, the author of
the study and an assistant professor of environmental and occupational
health sciences at UIC, in a statment issued by the school. "The
more alcohol you have in your system, the more the protective effect."
[...]
Friedman analyzed all 190,612 patients treated at Illinois' trauma
centers between 1995 and 2009 who were tested for blood-alcohol content,
with levels ranging from zero to 0.5 percent at time of admission. (Blood-alcohol
levels above about 0.35 percent can be fatal.) He found that with the
exception of burn injuries, the mortality rates of all types of traumatic
injury decreased as the blood-alcohol content of victims rose.
The conventional wisdom is that drunk people are more limp and relaxed
during the accident, but Friedman's results showed that's not the case.
Eli MacKinnon of LiveScience has the explanation:
here.
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