The folks in 'the Christmas Story' were right...you really might shoot your eye out.
News Radio 1200 WOAI reprots doctors at Ortho Now, the urgent care offices of the San Antonio Orthopaedic Group, say they are seeing an increase in injuries suffered by 'non powdered' guns.
And Dr. Daniel Valdez, who is at work at the Ortho Now clinic in Stone Oak, says this is a bad time of year.
"The post Christmas injuries are when people are playing with their new toys, and that includes bikes, skates, and air guns," he said.
Dr Valdez' observations mirror national trends. The number of eye injuries caused by non powdered guns, everything from BB guns to paint ball guns to air guns, is up 168% since 1999, according to the journal Pediatrics.
Dr. Valdez says we frequently dont take the power of an air gun seriously enough."The simplest or the safest are the nerf guns or the soft pellet guns, which cannot penetrate the skin," he said. "But still they could injure the eyes of they hit the cornea."
Dr. Valdez says wearing goggles or some other sort of eye protection should be mandatory when using non powdered guns.
Only 11% of eye injuries which required hospitalization which were caused by non powdered guns over that 18 year period happened when adults were present, the report in Pediatrics said.