Infographic: The Average Person Gets 9,672 Minor Injuries in a Lifetime

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From cuts and scrapes to close encounters of the shaving kind, our bodies can take quite a beating over the years.

Take a minute and do a little self-diagnostic on your body. Chances are, you've got at least one cut, ache, sprain or other minor ailment bothering you. If not, great news: something will probably happen to you in the next three days.

That's according to a recent year-long survey of 2,000 Britons who are either exceptionally clumsy or a good predictor of how often the rest of us are likely to suffer bumps and bruises over the course of a lifetime.

In a single year, the average British citizen cuts herself twice while shaving, gets one electric shock, and three papercuts. She'll lose her voice at least once and accidentally bite her tongue three times. Throw in your garden-variety headaches, cramps, blisters, trips and falls and other injuries, and you get 124 such incidents annually.

In case you're counting, that's 9,672 ailments over the course of a 78-year lifespan.

The study, conducted by the health non-profit Beneden Healthcare Society, also revealed that a quarter of Britons have gone to sit down and missed their chairs. Half of them have knocked their heads while getting out of a car. And 1 in 20 admitted to having slipped on a banana peel at least once, which suggests there might be some truth to the classic mishap, after all.

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Beneden Healthcare Society
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Brian Fung is the technology writer at National Journal. He was previously an associate editor at The Atlantic and has written for Foreign Policy and The Washington Post.

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