People have associated full moons with spooky incidents since the Middle Ages. In fact, the word "lunacy" stems from the strange effects a full moon supposedly has on behavior, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Physicians, nurses and other medical staff members across the country believe full moons bring chaos to their emergency departments and delivery wards. These clinicians say full moon nights — especially ones around Halloween — bring a flood of hospital admissions, including patients undergoing psychotic episodes, needing treatment for strange injuries or going into labor under rare circumstances, according to the report.
This belief is so engrained into clinicians, some hospitals add extra staff members on full moon nights and discourage physicians from taking the day off. Despite the popularity of this belief, research shows no link between the full moon and hospital admissions.
The American Journal of Emergency Medicine released a report in 1996 examining 150,999 admission records for an emergency department over four years. A full moon occurred 49 times in this period, but did not once boost admissions, according to the report.
On Saturday's full moon, a reporter from The Wall Street Journal visited Yale-New Haven (Conn.) Hospital, which houses the nation's third busiest emergency department, to investigate the phenomenon. Most physicians and nurses at the hospital believed in the full moon effect and offered various explanations for why it occurs.
"Our bodies are 70 percent water and because the moon moves the oceans, it moves the water in your body —people flip out," said Michelle Schusky, an X-ray technologist at the hospital with 40 years of experience.
Overall, the full moon night at the ED was quiet, except for the admittance of a few trauma patients and several intoxicated individuals. The nurses claimed this was unusual and some staff members offered an explanation for the slow night — too many physicians and nurses who are "white clouds," or clinicians with good luck, were working that night.
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