Doctors Believe Bad Things Happen On a Full Moon night,
What are their explanations ?
Vonce Barross, a mental and psychological health granny at Yale New Haven Hospital, is used to dealing with patients who could spin out of control and attack him at a moment’s notice.
That doesn’t matter him as much as working in the emergency room on a full-moon night.
In Saturday night when the moon was light and full, Mr. Barross arrived for his night shift ready for troubles and totally aware of how the night is going to pass. “I knew that disasters will be waiting for me”, he said.
Vampires
Since the middle Ages, full moons have been associated in the scary and creepy folk stories like Werewolves and Vampires. The word “lunacy” derives from the Latin ‘’Luna’’ means Insanity, which is the effect of full moons on behaviour.
In hospitals all over America, doctors, nurses and medical staffers—supposedly pragmatic professionals rooted in science—are convinced that full moons are harbingers of chaos in their emergency rooms and delivery wards.
Doctors and nurses say a full-moon night, especially right before Halloween, usually witnesses a flood of patients in hospitals mostly those who suffer from psychological disturbances. Some of them come with strange injuries or go into labor under unusual circumstances.
Supernatural Child
Octavia Cannon, a women’s doctor in Charlotte City- North Carolina, hasn’t forgotten the full-moon night when she delivered a “caul baby”, which is something rare.
“It was scary, to see the baby in its sac moving, and see fluid in there”, Dr. Cannon recalls, still rattled by the incidence many years later. She remembers nurses later saying that the baby, who was healthy, would be imbued with psychic powers.
Mary Leblond, an emergency-room nurse at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, recalls a full-moon night when several school buses raced up to the front of the hospital because dozens of high-school students who were in the buses had all gotten food poisoning and were throwing up everywhere.
There were so many sick teens that doctors and nurses had to treat them on the buses, bringing only the sickest ones inside, according to Ms. Leblond.
“Floor was full of people lying with IVs running. It would be a funny thing normally, but at that time no one thought it was funny.”
Believing that the full-moon has affects is so ingrained that some hospitals gets ready with all staff members and discourage doctors from taking the day off to prepare for the wild night.
Lunacy
The problem is that many scientific studies indicate that doctors’ belief in the full-moon effect is lunacy.
Researches show that there is no link between the full moon and hospital admissions.
The American Journal of Emergency Medicine published a report in 1996 analyzing more than 150 thousand record of patients who entered the emergency department during four years. The results were that full moon occurred 49 times during that period, and the number of patients didn’t rise once in those specific nights.
Jean Luc Margot, a professor of earth, planetary and space sciences at the University of California in Los Angeles, once decided to stray from his field of study after listening to a close friend who is a midwife. She told him about stories of births on full-moon nights and how they are more than other regular nights. Mr. Margot decided to explore the truth and determine if the phenomenon was real.
He published a scientific research in 2015 in Nursing Research magazine showing that there was “no relation” between moon phases and hospital admission rates or birth rates.
“This shows us how intelligent and reasonable people may have ideas and beliefs that are not founded in reality”, he says, although he confesses that he has never stayed a full-moon night in a hospital.
Strangely, the full moon does witness a “significant increase” in the numbers of dogs and cats which are taken to emergency veterinary clinics, according to a study in 2007.
Two naked people
John Beacher, a doctor who spent 40 years in emergency-room in hospitals in New Jersey and Philadelphia, says that any scientific researches contradicting the power of full moons is wrong.
On his last full-moon night before he retired in 2012, he recalls the police brought in two people who were wandering around the city naked, telling passersby: “We’re not ashamed of our bodies. If you’re ashamed of yours, you should cover up”.
“I’ve become a believer to the point where I don’t want to work on a full moon night”, says Dr. Beacher.
Staffing issue
The American Wall Street Journal decided to investigate in that matter during the 15th of October in a Saturday’s full moon. Journalists stayed in the emergency department at Yale New Haven Hospital, nation’s third-busiest emergency department. They barley found a doctor or nurse who didn’t believe in the full moon effect or have an explanation for why it occurs.
“Our bodies contain 70% water, and because the moon moves the oceans, it moves the water in our body, and people flip out,” says Michelle chusky, an X-ray technologist who has worked in hospitals for 40 years.
After hours of partial calm with the journalist setting with them, medical staffers admitted that the night was calm with no disasters. There were only a couple of trauma patients, one of them was a gunshot wound and the other was a stroke victim, with the usual round of drunk people stumbling in at 3 a.m., shouting and punching and spitting.
The crowded rooms were dark and empty, and the hallways which were usually full of stretchers were empty too.
Nurses urged and claimed that this emptiness was unusual. Believers explained that calmness with that too many doctors and nurses who are “white clouds” (staffers who carry good luck) were working that night.
“If a black-cloud doctor was working that night, it would have been a disaster”, commented the Wall Street Journal reporter.
At the end, Heidi Gudio, a nurse who has worked at the hospital for more than 20 years, said that ‘’It’s obviously a staffing issue’’.
