What E.R. Doctors Wish You’d Avoid

It’s pretty hard to shock an emergency physician. “We see the worst of the worst, and the silliest of the silliest,” Abdullah Pratt, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago Medicine, told me recently.

I was chatting with him about the situations he’d witnessed in the E.R., specifically the ones that made him change his own behavior. To start, he told me, he would never wear Crocs when it’s snowy or icy outside.

I sheepishly confessed that, just the night before, I’d slipped on a pair and traversed my frozen driveway to take out the trash.

“No way,” Dr. Pratt said. “Please don’t tell me you broke your ankle.”

In winter, he sees “Croc-specific injuries” once a week. The shoes “don’t provide traction, and they don’t provide any ankle support,” he said. “People go flying, and so do their Crocs.”

Dr. Pratt isn’t willing to risk an injury for a quick errand — and, after talking to him, neither am I.

Read on for more lessons Dr. Pratt and other emergency room doctors learned — and want you to remember — after years in the E.R.

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