ER doctor shares 4th of July safety reminder

For many people, the 4th of July means barbecues, parades, and setting off fireworks. To police officers, firefighters, and emergency room doctors, it means something else entirely - severe burns and blown-up hands.

The last thing you want to do is spend your holiday in the emergency room, but if you did, you might see some pretty devastating injuries.

Dr. Angelique Campen is an emergency room physician at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank . She tells KNX News' Jon Baird , "Typically on the fourth of July, we see a lot of explosive injuries, burns, fingers and hands, hurt, faces, hurt, eyes hurt."

She says fireworks are unpredictable; they are prone to discharging before or after you intended them to and can shoot in the opposite direction than you thought they would.

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Dr. Campen says even sparklers are bad news, and you should never give them to children, period.

"There's still fire; they still burn," she said. "So kids will touch them or hold them too high, and their hands will get burned, their face will get burned, and we see a lot of injuries in children this way."

So Campen says to skip the fireworks and - bonus tip - don't shoot a gun in the air either. "What goes up must come down, and it comes down at a similar velocity," said the doctor. And that could leave somebody dead.

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