Massachusetts Personal Injury News
Doctors Urged to Warn Against Texting and Driving
Dr. Amy Ship of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday to urge doctors to tell their patients not to use cellphones while driving.
The journal was published just hours after the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation approved the Distracted Driving Prevention Act. The bill would provide incentives to states with distracted driving regulations.
It would offer federal grants to states that already have restrictions on cellphone use and texting, and would also require the Secretary of Transportation to issue regulations on the use of wireless devices by commercial vehicle drivers, Reuters reported.
Limiting or banning cellphone use while driving may prevent auto accidents since distracted driving-related accident reports have been increasing over the last few years. The National Safety Council has estimated that 28 percent of all traffic accidents in the US, some 1.6 million, involve some kind of use of cellphones, whether it is texting, emailing or just talking on the phone.
According to Dr. Ship, keeping people off cellphones while driving is an important public safety health measure. One way to do this, Ship suggested, is for doctors to tell their patients not to talk on cellphones while driving, and to lock them in the trunk during their trip if that is what it took to avoid the impulse to use them.
A 2006 study, Ship said, found that talking on a cellphone posed the same risk as driving while intoxicated, even with the help of a hands-free device, which can be more dangerous than to talking to an actual passenger. Ship said that “You’re more engaged with your environment than when someone is not present.”
“Driving while distracted is roughly equivalent to driving drunk,” she wrote in the Journal.
According to Ship, just as doctors would urge patients not to smoke or drink, they should urge patients to stop using their cellphones in the car. Doctors could play a key role in reducing cellphone-related accidents, just as a patient was more likely to quit smoking if a doctor spent three minutes discussing the risks of tobacco use, she wrote.
“Although there are many possible distractions for drivers, more than 275 million Americans own cell phones, and 81 percent of them talk on those phones while driving,” Ship wrote.
Currently, at least 28 U.S. states now ban texting while driving.
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