RAPID RESPONSES FROM BMJ.COM

doi:10.1136/bmjusa.01070002

BMJ, doi: 10.1136/bmjusa.01070002, (Published 5 September 2002)

Letters

RAPID RESPONSES FROM BMJ.COM

As of June 25th, 62 rapid responses had been posted on bmj.com in response to the editorial on banning "accidents." Barry Pless and I distilled the negative commentary into 10 key arguments, and prepared responses to each of them, which we posted as our own rapid response. A sampling of the original rapid responses (after editing), along with our reply, is presented below. $---$ EDITOR

"Accident" should not be purged

Accident looking for somewhere to happen

BMJ takes leadership role

Some daft terminology

Accidents do happen!

Injevents?

If you need more convincing, look to Katmandu

"Accident" should not be purged

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This article originally appeared in BMJ USA

EDITOR $---$ The irrationality of the lay public, who need to be educated in the "facts" of injury epidemiology, is a seductivethesis, but sadly it has no basis in evidence. Detailed qualitativework ¹ ² has demonstrated that the "lay" public largely sharethe understanding of public health professionals $---$ that accidentsare predictable, and ultimately preventable, at least in theory,and that luck has little part to play in the distribution of injury.They also understand the prevention paradox: that population-levelknowledge of the risk factors for accidental injury is of littlehelp in explaining any specific individual event, except perhapsinretrospect.

Attempts to create a terminology with unnecessary neologisms, unique to medical journals, are likely to alienate further thoseprofessionals who work with communities on accident prevention.³We already have a perfectly adequate generic term to cover therange of events that . . . [Full text of this article]