The emergency room can be a pretty hectic place, even under the best of circumstances. So imagine how much worse it gets as the economy sputters, people start having shorter fuses and less patience, and domestic abuse and alcoholism concerns rise. Not for patients, but for those who provide them with their health care.
In this case, the harm is coming to emergency room (ER) nurses, who have to deal not only with the typical patients who may present at a hospital’s ER, but also a lot more patients that may have a tendency to ignore appropriate boundaries, especially when it comes to physical touch.

Emergency room nurse Erin Riley suffered bruises, scratches and a chipped tooth last year from trying to pull the clamped jaws of a psychotic patient off the hand of a doctor at a suburba…