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It’s important to keep your lungs healthy. As you heal, practice taking deep breaths. It’s important not to be afraid of taking the pain medication as prescribed because keeping the pain under control is important for taking strong, deep breaths.
If you go to the ER, the doctor may send you home with a tool to encourage deep breathing. The tool is called an incentive spirometer. It measures lung capacity so patients can see how well their lungs are recovering as the broken rib heals.
The most common complication of broken ribs is not being able to take a deep breath because it hurts. If you don’t breathe deeply enough, mucous and moisture can build up in the lungs and lead to an infection such as pneumonia.
Displaced rib fractures can damage other tissues or organs and sometimes lead to collapsed lungs (pneumothorax) or internal bleeding.
Any force hard enough to break a rib is powerful enough to cause other, more life-threatening injuries. It’s also possible to break more than one rib at a time. More than three broken ribs at one time are potentially life-threatening. Since the only way to know for sure is to get an X-ray, it’s important to go to the emergency department anytime you suspect a broken rib.
It’s especially dangerous if the patient has any of the following signs or symptoms:
If you’ve been hit hard enough in the chest to make you think you may have broken a rib or two, go to the emergency department or call 911.
One of the best ways to identify a broken rib is the mechanism of injury. Getting hit in the chest, falling on something and hitting the chest or smashing the chest into a steering wheel or dashboard during a car accident could certainly lead to broken ribs. Forceful coughing can also be a mechanism for breaking ribs.
After an injury to the chest—or particularly forceful coughing—consider the possibility of a broken rib if the patient has any of the following:
Most of the time, the rib is only broken in one place, and is an “incomplete fracture,” meaning not all the way through the bone.
Completely broken ribs may or may not move out of place. If they do move, they’re called displaced rib fractures and are more likely to puncture lungs or damage other tissues and organs.2 Ribs that stay in place—usually ribs that are not completely broken in half—are called nondisplaced rib fractures.
Rarely, a section of the ribcage breaks away from the surrounding bone and muscle. This area loses its stable structure (imagine a short rack of baby-backs connected to the rest of the ribcage only by muscle) and moves fairly easily as the patient breathes. This section is known as a flail segment and is much more dangerous than simply broken ribs.
Ribs are pretty hard to break. They are a bony framework that protects the vital organs located within the chest cavity. They are also are surrounded by strong muscles and usually can take a lot of abuse before they crack.
Most broken ribs—including in children—come from vehicle accidents, but they’re also common from falling off horses, sports injuries, and falls.1 In some cases, lots of forceful coughing—like from a bout of pneumonia—can cause rib fractures. The elderly can get broken ribs easier than younger adults. Kids have more flexible bones.