Driving with a forearm plaster cast: patients' perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Forearm plaster casts are commonly used in orthopaedic practice for the treatment of fractures of the wrist and carpal bones. A common question put by patients seeks to clarify suitability to drive a motor vehicle. DVLA guidelines do not specifically comment about temporary immobilisation in a cast. METHODS: A questionnaire was sent to 248 adult patients who had recently been treated in Colles' or scaphoid-type casts to determine the driving habits of the patients and their attitudes to the legality and safety of driving with a cast. RESULTS: Of those who responded, 87% considered it unsafe to drive a car with a plaster cast. 79% thought it should be illegal. Only 9% of patients reported driving while immobilised, and these tended to be young men who did not inform any authority. Previous literature is confusing and there appears to be little consensus among orthopaedic surgeons about letting these patients drive. Clarification is reported from the Medical Advisory Group at the DVLA and the Head of Road Policing Business Area for the Association of Chief Police Officers. CONCLUSION: It is recommended that all medical professionals advise their patients that they should not drive while immobilised in an upper limb plaster cast.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".