Big games clear out hospitals

On Sunday night, as the Chicago White Sox were set to clinch their first World Series berth since 1959, I couldn’t help but think of those quieter-than-usual emergency rooms in the Windy City and all the doctors and nurses wondering where the heck their patients were.

My thoughts were confined, however, to the hospitals on the city’s south side, which is home to the White Sox. On the north side of town, Chicago Cubs territory, emergency rooms presumably were doing business as usual.

I wouldn’t normally have had any reason to equate the great game of baseball with the traffic rate in emergency rooms if not for an interesting study I read about last month in the Science section of The New York Times. In one of the more curious examinations of the effect that sports has on the sense of well-being among passionate fans, a team of doctors in Boston decided to see whether big games being played on TV really did influence the number of patients at area emergency rooms.

Doctors have long recognized, at least anecdotally, that fewer people seem to show up for treatment at an ER when a major sporting event is going on. But the Boston researchers wanted to know whether they could finally make a direct connection between the volume of patients and the popularity of a particular sporting event.

Being in Beantown, of course, the doctors figured there was no better time to conduct such a study than last fall, when the Red Sox were clawing their way through the playoffs and making fans across New England believe they might actually get to celebrate one world championship before they died.

The researchers scrutinized hour-by-hour emergency room use at six Boston-area hospitals during the 11 Red Sox playoff games. Then they compared those figures with the number of people who were watching the games. And what they found, according to the study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, was that the Red Sox faithful tended to show up at emergency rooms at normal or slightly higher-than-normal rates when it appeared their beloved team was on the verge of losing a big game. But whenever the buncha idiots began to come from behind in a game, visits suddenly dropped by 5 percent. During the highest-rated TV games – the final games of each series – attendance at emergency rooms plummeted by as much as 15 percent.

The researchers said they can’t be certain what the statistics reveal, aside from the obvious fact that Red Sox fans are not easily distracted from their baseball, especially when the Yankees are involved. The doctors speculated, however, that the lower numbers could indicate that many people who show up at emergency rooms may not really be sick enough to need one at that moment. It might also be true, they said, that a city’s injury rate is lower when a sizable chunk of its population is watching baseball safely at home on the couch.

Maybe so. But what the study doesn’t tell us is whether there was a surge in emergency room visits an hour or so after last year’s big games, when certain diehard Red Sox fans finally realized that the chest pains, irregular heartbeats, sweaty palms, shortness of breath and bouts of dizziness might have been more than just the typical symptoms of Red Sox fever.

The doctors on Chicago’s south side should look into this phenomenon, when things slow down in the ER. If White Sox fever is anything like the Red Sox variety, there should be a lull once the World Series begins.