Crush injuries are among the worst types of injuries that a person may experience. Despite their association with industries like construction, they can actually happen to anyone.
Thus, it is important for people to have an understanding of the basics regarding crush injuries.
How do crush injuries happen?
Up To Date discusses crush injuries and how they affect people. First: what are they? A crush injury occurs in situations where a person ends up pinned between, flattened by, run down, smashed, pressed, hit or otherwise compressed by a larger and/or heavier object.
Crush injuries happen in a number of situations. For example, someone could suffer from a crush injury by getting their hand caught in a door or having their foot run over by a vehicle.
These injuries also often happen during natural disasters, especially earthquakes and hurricanes due to the high amount of debris and the potential for collapsing structures.
Crush injuries require immediate attention because they can do a lot of potential damage at essentially any level of duration or intensity.
Expected potential complications
Some of the complications of crush injuries include gangrene, sepsis, necrosis, the risk of amputation and the risk of organs beginning to fail. The type of complication a person faces will usually depend on the area of the body that suffered the injury. For example, extremity crush injuries have a higher rate of gangrene while torso crush injuries put the organs at risk.
Of course, a crush injury could easily lead to permanent disability or even death depending on the severity. This is why medical aid is critical.