Ch.25 Traumaoverview Flashcards
Occur as a result of physical forces applied to the body
Trauma emergencies
___ emergencies include illnesses or conditions; these are not caused by an outside force
Medical emergencies
Similarly,_____ may result from recent or remote traumatic injuries (pneumonia develops in a patient a few days after a fall that fractured the patient’s ribs).
medical illnesses
Next, different types of vehicle crashes and their effect
on the body are explained. By assessing a vehicle that has crashed, you can often determine what happened to the passengers at the time of impact. This may allow you to predict what injuries the passengers sustained at the time of impact.
Evaluation of the mechanism of injury for the trauma patient will provide you with an_____ for different types of serious and/or life-threatening underlying injuries.
index of suspicion
Certain injury patterns occur with certain types of injury events. The ______is your awareness and concern for potentially serious underlying and unseen injuries.
index of suspicion
Traumatic injury occurs when the body’s tissues are exposed to energy levels beyond their__
tolerance
The____ is the way in which traumatic injuries occur; it describes the forces (or energy transmission) acting on the body that cause injury.
mechanism of injury. (MOI)
The forces, or energy transmission, applied to the body that cause injury
Mechanism of injury
Three concepts of energy are typically associated with injury (not including thermal energy, which causes burns):___
potential energy, kinetic energy, and the energy of work.
When considering the effects of energy on the human body, it is important to remember that energy can be___
neither created nor destroyed: it can only be converted or transformed.
It is not the objective of this section to help you reconstruct the scene of a motor vehicle crash. Rather, you should have a sense of the effects of the event on the human body and understand, in a broad sense, how that event is related to potential and__.
kinetic energy
The product of mass, gravity, and height, which is converted into kinetic energy and results in injury, such as from a fall
Potential energy
The energy of a moving object
Kinetic energy
The measure of force over distance
Work
___is defined as force acting over a distance. For example, the force needed to bend metal multiplied by the distance over which the metal is bent is the work that crushes the front end of a vehicle that is involved in a frontal impact. Similarly, forces that bend, pull, or compress tissues beyond their inherent limits result in the work that causes injury.
Work
The energy of a moving object is called_____._____ reflects the relationship between the mass (weight)
of the object and the velocity (speed) at which it is traveling.
kinetic energy
Remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted. In the case of a motor vehicle crash, the____ of the speeding vehicle is converted into the work of stopping the vehicle, usually by crushing the vehicle’s exterior
kinetic energy
Similarly, the passengers of the vehicle have kinetic energy because they were traveling at the same speed as the vehicle. Their kinetic energy is converted to the work of bringing them to a stop. It is this work on the passengers that results in injury. Notice that, according to the equation for kinetic energy, the energy that is available to cause injury doubles when an object’s weight doubles but____ when its speed doubles. When a car’s speed increases from 50 to 70 mph, the energy that is available to cause injury nearly doubles.
quadruples
This point is even clearer when considering gunshot wounds. The speed of the bullet (high-velocity compared with low-velocity) has a greater impact on producing injury than the mass (size) of the bullet. Therefore, it is important to report to the hospital the type of firearm that was used in a shooting. The amount of ____that is converted to do work on the body dictates the severity of the injury. High-energy injuries often produce such severe damage that patients require immediate transport to an appropriate facility to have any hope of survival.
kinetic energy
_____is the product of mass (weight), force of gravity, and height and is mostly associated with the energy of falling objects. A worker on a scaffold has_____ because he or she is some height above the ground. If the worker falls,_______ is converted into kinetic energy. As the worker hits the ground, the kinetic energy is converted into work —that is, the work of bringing the body to a stop and thereby fracturing bones and damaging tissues.
Potential energy
____________states that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by some force. The first part of the law is fairly clear. An object such as an empty soda can will not move spontaneously unless some force, such as a gust of wind, acts on it. An example will help to illustrate the second part. In a car traveling at 30 mph, the passengers and the car are moving at 30 mph. The passengers do not feel as though they are moving because they are not moving relative to the car.
However, when the car strikes a concrete barrier and comes to a sudden stop, the passengers continue to travel at 30 mph. They stay in motion until they are acted on by an external force most likely the windshield, steering wheel, or dashboard. To appreciate the severity of the impact, think of the driver as sitting motionless while a steering wheel rams into his or her chest at 30 mph. Now consider that the same thing happens to the driver’s internal organs. They also are in motion, traveling at 30 mph relative to the ground, until they are acted on by an external force, in this case the sternum, rib cage, or other body structure. This scenario illustrates the three collisions that are associated with blunt trauma.
Newton’s first law of motion
Traumatic injuries can be considered in two categories:___
blunt trauma and penetrating trauma.
___is the result of force (or energy transmission) to the body that causes injury without anything penetrating the soft tissues or internal organs and cavities.
Blunt trauma
_____results in injury by objects that pierce and penetrate the surface of the body and injure the underlying soft tissues, internal organs, and body cavities. Either type of trauma may occur from a variety of MOls. It is important to consider unseen as well as visible, obvious injuries with either type of trauma. Damage to the underlying deeper tissues is often more significant.
Penetrating trauma