Ice Hockey Injuries

Abstract

Ice hockey is a graceful, vicious game, especially as it is played by North American professional teams. If anyone doubts the sport's brutality, he failed to see or read about the contest earlier this year between an all-star Russian team and the Philadelphia Flyers. As might be expected with sticks slashing, a puck flying at tremendous speed, fast skating, and rampant body-checking, injuries (many of them serious) are frequent. Like any other body-contact sport, hockey produces its share of fractures, bruises, and damages to vulnerable joints. In addition, there are traumas almost peculiar to hockey, including lacerations of the head and face, punched-out incisor and canine teeth, and ocular injuries. Of the last, Vinger 1 reported ocular injuries suffered by 38 hockey players over a three-year period. From the nature of his report and from his tabulation of age ranges of the injured, it seems evident that he was writing