About three weeks ago I got my first mention in the New York Times. The most interesting thing about getting a mention in the Times is how people react to that information. They are either impressed or suspicious, including a substantial group of people that harbor a near-religious hatred for the Gray Lady. I’m sure that by their metric the Times deserves it. The newspaper had had its share of credibility and gullibility issues over the last decade. Still, I find it more comforting than frightening that the forces of evil would be so far behind the curve as to seize the flagship of a decaying media like the newspaper, my own mention notwithstanding.

Fortunately all these crosscurrents of opinion about the Times won’t affect me, as I wasn’t actually mentioned by name. The article was headlined “Hurt at Home, and a Fall Is Likely to Blame”, and it lays out recent statistical analysis that the most common cause of injury to Americans is falling down, with most of those falls happening at home.
I’d fallen just the day before, tripping on something that wasn’t there while walking the dog. Somehow I managed to stab one shoe awkwardly into the sidewalk, where it caught, sending me tumbling to the ground.

It must’ve looked pretty bad, because a passing car to stopped to see if Grampa was okay. Pride aside, he was for the most part fine, though he had ruined his jeans and for the first time in 45 years skinned his knee. As my dog vacillated between concern and embarrassment, I picked myself up and waved off the driver, making it the rest of the way home without incident, only to find out the next day that I’d accidentally stumbled into the statistical mainstream.

In second place behind falling down came transportation injuries. Accidental poisoning was third, which raises a statistical red flag. It seems likely that a substantial number of those poisoned also fall down at some point, with more than a few winding up in traffic accidents while rushing to the emergency room. Are these incidents counted in one or multiple categories?

The article also noted that women are more likely to be injured in a fall than men, whereas men are more likely to be struck by an object. How many of those women were pushed by men, and how many of those objects were thrown by women, are questions that apparently escaped scrutiny.

This points out the problematic nature of all statistics. Numbers can be accurate without offering any clear insight into exactly what they measure. For example, gun control advocates constantly harp on the disproportionate number of gun-related deaths in our society versus the rest of the developed world, but they make no attempt to quantify how many lives may have been saved by the presence of firearms.

Nor do they ever mention that 56% of all gun deaths in America are suicides. You’d think that would be a comforting statistic to those concerned with reducing the collateral damage of gun violence, as it indicates that the number of gun owners predisposed to using their weapons is to a large extent self-limiting.

It also calls into question the efficacy of restricting ownership of the most lethal weapons and ammunition, if only for the sake of holding down the substantial costs to the health care system of all those failed firearm suicide attempts. In this context, the grenade launcher and the killer bullet are simply the most efficient means to the end. It is the wounded who are bleeding the system dry.

As to what to do about the epidemic of slips, trips, tumbles, dives, plunges, and toppling over; my suggestion it to stay in bed whenever possible. It may not be the magic bullet, but you don’t need a statistician to tell you that the best way to avoid falling down is to not get up to begin with.