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About January 2003's Restraint "Hands On: Tricks of the Trade" Column Currently Unpublished by JEMS |
Mr Dick,
Your recent series of articles in the "Tricks of the Trade" Column in Jems was brought to my attention recently, and I have to say that I was pretty amazed that the legal department apparently hadn't had a chat with you regarding your recommendation that choke holds be used to restrain patients. Most law enforcement agencies, including the oft-accused Los Angeles Police Department, have policies which reject the use of choke holds as too dangerous. There have been a number of court rulings, including a US District Court in California and the Supreme Court of Utah, indicating that choke holds are an unacceptable practice.
Choke holds are a technique taught in the martial arts, but even in that community, the choke hold has come under pressure as being potentially dangerous, especially in the hands of the untrained. In the Kodokan experiment, five black belts were used as victims while a sixth performed choke holds using three different methods. The first method required squeezing the neck as a whole, the second method compressed the carotid arteries and the third depressed the trachea. Some of the general symptoms elicited were as follows: after only 10 seconds of choking, the victims fell unconscious and remained unconscious from 10 to 12 seconds. During this period the victims some times developed clonic, jerking or fluttering muscle movement. In several cases, the tracheal compression method produced so much pain that the victim did not lose consciousness. It should be noted that in all cases the person inflicting the choke hold released his grip immediately after the subjects fell unconscious, thereby limiting the effect of choking to a short period, so the most serious effects were not, or could not, be studied.
So, given the deleterious effects demonstrated by the Kodokan experiment and the court findings against police agencies using choke holds, how can you even suggest that people with no training in the technique and thereby no idea how to limit the damage to the patient, use this procedure?
Dina Carson
Colorado
Email Charly at: c-d-miller@neb.rr.com