Hilarious Journal Articles #34: Harry Potter Decreases Emergency Room Visits

Building upon the work of researchers who noted that emergency room visits decrease during the world series, researchers in the British Medical Journal have discovered that visits for injuries to pediatric emergency rooms decrease when new Harry Potter books are released.

To date no research has addressed the option of "distraction therapy" to prevent traumatic injuries. Alternative strategies such as "restraint therapy" and "pharmacological modification'" have been considered and abandoned on ethical grounds. Distraction therapy has been used successfully in settings such as painful clinical procedures with good effect.

We observed a significant fall in the numbers of attendees to the emergency department on the weekends that of the two most recent Harry Potter books were released. Both these weekends were in mid-summer with good weather. It may therefore be hypothesised that there is a place for a committee of safety conscious, talented writers who could produce high quality books for the purpose of injury prevention.

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