Perhaps it’s an odd gauge to your health, but doctors working at Britain’s Reading rock festival have begun applying an interesting test. When people brought in suffering from panic attacks or fainting are able to text their friends, they’re generally well enough to be released.
Certain bands, like Green Day, Bloc Party, and Rage Against the Machine filled the medical tents with people, and doctors began applying the informal test, which they’d first discovered during a 2004 Green Day performance, according to the BBC.
Dr Mike Sinclair, a retired anesthetist and volunteer, told the British Medical Journal that the ability to text means that the psychomotor co-ordination was working properly.
"Obviously, we did not check to make sure the texts made sense – but this might not be easy, given that many of them appear to make no sense at the best of times," he added.
Dr. Sinclair believes the test might have an application for hospital emergency room patients, although Jim Bethel, a lecturer in emergency care and nurse practitioner at a Walsall A&E department, is less certain. He said:
"I can’t imagine it would be a criteria for discharge in an A&E setting, but it could certainly make you less concerned than you otherwise might be about a particular patient."
