Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeggyO I was waiting for commotio cordis to show up. Kind of inevitable with a mention of punching the sternum. quote:
The fact is that you have to hit in a very exact location at exactly the right moment during the heartbeat with a certain velocity and a certain density of the object. As I recall, the exactness of the location just improves the odds of causing it. I could certainly be wrong, though, I'm not a cardiologist or anything. Apart from that, I'd assume it's a question of impact and timing. I got the impression 1-in-40 was accurate, given a hard punch in the right area. And an untrained person can generate about 80 J, if memory serves. quote:
If commotio cordis were even a statistical risk, it would be reflected in dojos and boxing rings. It's not. I don't have any of those statistics, so I couldn't comment on them. I will say, however, that the martial arts I've been interested in over the years do not punch the sternum unless the intent is to compress the entire cavity and preferrably break the join near the top of the sternum. Doing either requires a lot more force than you'd usually direct at a sparring partner. quote:
Out of curiosity, can anyone document a case of commotio cordis arising from a chest punch? Define document. I don't have the charts and journals. Someone from this school took a punch he shouldn't have. The guy on the receiving end was open and not paying attention. Obviously, you don't get an opening like that most of the time, and the uke did the silly thing: he went for it. The tori collapsed, and I don't recall how it went from there. I do recall that the doc said he had gone into fibrillation, though. And that there was debris from his sternum around his pericardium. Not representative for what you'd see during play, though, I hope.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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