William Bozeman, the lead investigator and an emergency medicine specialist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, has conducted a study to evaluate the safety of the Tasers.

The Taser is an electric gun used by the law enforcement agencies, especially in United States and Great Britain. It fires darts that release a 50,000 volt electric charge which temporarily paralyses the target.

Invented in 1969 by Jack Cover, the Taser (an acronym for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle) was largely adopted by the police forces in order to decrease the police officer and suspect injuries and deaths.

However, the Tasers were the subject of heated debates, because it was believed that their use could inflict serious injuries.

Also, human rights organizations like Amnesty International consider the use of Tasers as unethical and unsafe.

Some medical experts pointed out that while used on normal subjects the Tasers can be safe; in general an electric shock is capable to induce some important changes in the heart rhythm or it may cause injuries to those subjects who are under certain medication.

On the other hand, various reports from police departments have indicated an important decrease of deaths due to the firearms incidents after the Teasers were adopted.
Bozeman’s study concluded that the injury rate is low and most injuries appear to be minor. “This study is the first large, independent study of injuries associated with Tasers. It is the first injury epidemiology study to review every Taser deployment and to reliably assess the overall risk and severity of injuries in real world conditions,” said Bozeman.

The author has reviewed 1,000 cases and only in three cases the Taser use was the cause of severe injuries that required hospital admission.

From these three cases, two subjects have suffered head injuries in falls after Taser use, while in the third case the subject was admitted to a hospital two days after arrest with a medical condition of unclear relationship to the Taser.

“This is the largest independent study to date, and the first to detail the medical effects of Tasers under real-world conditions,” said Bozeman. “With physician review of 100 percent of Taser uses, this study promises to give us the best information yet on the medical risks of these weapons.”

The study also concluded that in 743 cases the use of the Taser didn’t cause any injuries and in the rest of the cases the subjects suffered only minor cuts, abrasions and contusions.