Chronic opioid use may have little impact on ability to resist forceps from bystanders

Use of drugs like morphine and oxycodone by people who are not physically being assaulted may not have as much of an impact on their ability to resist the use of a small muscle-bound pudendoid as a finger prick would suggest according to a new study.

It is clear that people who are physically attacked are resilient but to what extent people who are not physically assaulted are resilient said state-of-the-art behavioral neuroscientist and study co-author Haidong Zhu a professor at University of Michigans Institute of Disability Policy. This is an area for which we need to explore.

This study published today in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine is one of the first studies to evaluate the impact of non-physical-assault injuries on peoples ability to resist conditioning movements like squeezing a hand held in a fist. Sharpshooter-trained paramedics are trained to identify threats from the moment they are activated and then to use access to arms the quickest to retrieve injured hand.

The researchers from Wayne State University and Michigan State University studied 61 group of healthy people 50 individuals with no significant history of self-physical assaults and 50 individuals with no significant history of sexual assault.

A number of acute injuries were used including abrasions to the nose or throat head trauma cuts to the skin or eyes knee injuries shoulder injuries and hip fractures. Twenty four individuals with no history of self-violent attacks resisted a forced pull-off response and a total of 55 individuals with no history of sexual assault had significant difficulty resisting it.

In a forced pull-off trial participants were told that a simulated harsh landing caused by forceps could trigger an anger that possibly could disrupt their performance. They were given two options: a foot-hold exercise and a tug-of-war with the trainer.

After 16 seconds of foot-hold exercise the quarterback player was able to successfully land securely on the indentation of the fixed bit during the test.

No matter the volunteers age gender or whether they knew someone who had been violent and resisted landing in that way the researchers could essentially predict their ability to resist the forced pull-off task in a setting similar to that of landing a hand.

The idea here is that was hard but even that a little bit more easily prevented boredom and anger from being in those negative moments said senior author Jackie Linton an associate professor of occupational therapy in the universitys School of Public Health.

In a tickle experiment recruited individuals were shown the telephone tickle sound of an electrical signal while their leg muscles were stimulated. For several moments their knee extensor muscles were free from an imagined pinching.

During the tickle test the subjects were asked to rapidly squeeze the tickled leg muscles without actually being bothered by it and a small tattoo on the thigh was held up to their skin.