In the wake of allegations that the nephew of a supreme court justice was Tased in a Louisiana hospital, The Washington Post‘s Leslie Tamura has found that
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151 hospitals in the United States use or are testing Taser electronic control devices, according to the company that makes the devices. Each hospital develops their own guidelines for Taser use. Experts quoted in Tamura’s story seem to agree that Tasers should be used as a last resort.
Jeffrey Ho, identified in the story as an emergency room doctor and the author of a 2009 paper about the use of Tasers in health-care settings, points out that “The hospital environment is not 100 percent calm and peaceful all the time. Acts of violence do occur against staff, physicians, nurses, those types of things, and really the best method of security is to be proactive.”
But the Taser company blog tells us that Ho is “an independent, expert medical consultant to TASER.” That potential conflict of interest has been noted by Dan Bowman at Fierce Healthcare and Bernice Young at Mother Jones, who reported in 2009 that Ho had received $70,000 in 12 months from the company.
Robert Philibert, a professor of psychiatry, genetics and neurosciences at the University of Iowa who has studied Tasers and similar weapons in psychiatric care, calls the practice “extraordinarily troubling.”
Another expert quoted in the story, William P. Bozeman of Wake Forest University, says receiving a Taser shot is painful “but as soon as the Taser stops sending out electricity, the pain is over and you’re fully functional again in a matter of moments.” Bozeman, as the story points out, “published a study in 2009 of 1,201 people who had been stunned and found that 99.7 percent of them have few to no injuries.”
