Do it yourself: bad for your health?

Either a lot more of us are trying to DIY around the house, or we're just not as careful as we used to be. Emergency rooms visits from DIY-related injuries -- specifically those resulting from nail guns accidents -- have doubled since 2001. This, after having tripled between 1991 and 2005, which adds up to about 14,800 people every year that are driving nails into themselves on accident -- making these seemingly random incidents a significant national health concern.

Fortunately, it's not entirely our fault. According to researchers, safety training (read: not being so careless) is an important factor, but the only way to see a real reduction in these sorts of injuries is to make safer tools. In particular, they'd like to see nail guns with safer triggers, that prevent rapid, unintentional firing.

"These kinds of injuries are often seen as bizarre accidents, but they actually occur fairly frequently," says Dr. Hester Lipscomb, Ph.D., the study's author. This means it can happen to you, so be careful, think before you buy a tool you don't know how to use, and if in doubt, don't be afraid to ask for help from a professional.