Urgent care doctors and emergency room doctors approach the Fourth of July with very mixed feelings.
“It’s a very busy holiday for us,” says Dr. Nicole Cimino-Fiallos, an urgent care physician at Kaiser Permanente. But it doesn’t have to be. “Most injuries at the Fourth of July are preventable, and there are things they can do to avoid getting hurt.”
The obvious thing to watch out for is fireworks. There were 14,000 injuries and 11 deaths connected with fireworks on the holiday in 2024. Cimino-Fiallos says the best and safest thing to do is leave it to the pros.
“The best way to enjoy fireworks is a professional licensed show,” she says. But is you’re determined to do it yourself, be prepared. “I don’t like to let my children play with fireworks,” Cimino-Fiallos says, “but if you’re going to have fireworks around your kids, be supervising them at all times, only using legal fireworks, having water nearby.” This includes a garden hose or a big can of water, in case of a burn or a fire. She also recommends wearing eye protection, because many fireworks produce projectiles when they explode.
Even sparklers, which seem pretty innocuous and don’t give off a lot of heat from even a few inches away, turn out to be much hotter than, say, a match. “That little bright light on the sparkler as it moves down is like a moth to a flame for children,” Cimino-Fiallos said. “They just want to touch it. So I have seen several injuries that way, unfortunately. And sometimes they get thrown on the ground and kids will step on them with their bare feet.”
Other Holiday Hazards
Because the Fourth is in mid-summer, celebrants are also susceptible to some of the usual hazards of the season. One of the biggest ones being heat exhaustion. Cimino-Fiallos says people are often too busy celebrating to remember that they need to take shade and water breaks. And alcohol doesn’t help the process either.
She’s not working the Fourth of July, but she’ll be on the job on the 3rd and the 5th, which she says are sometimes busier than the actual holiday. “People don’t want to come in on the actual holiday, but they’ll come in the next day with burns and different injuries. Or they’re just feeling really bad because they did get heat exhaustion.”
She says to come straight in if you suffer from a face or eye injury, a burn that’s bigger than the palm of your hand, or burns that cross joints, such as over your fingers or toes.”
“We [also] want to see people if they’re feeling dizzy, nauseous, have a bad headache, or aren’t able to effectively hydrate at home,” she says.
There are also sometimes grilling injuries, as well as the usual pool-safety rules to follow (most importantly, keep an eye on kids around the water).
“We hate to see a kid’s holiday ruined by a preventable injury, and unfortunately, children, as you know, are not as good at anticipating what injuries could happen on the holiday, so parents need to be vigilant and be paying attention, so that their kids can have a safe and happy Fourth.”
Featured image, Konstantin Yuganov/stock.adobe.com
