The Mechanisms of Injury In An Auto Accident | Auto Accident Attorney Tampa FL

Mechanisms of injury is simply the mechanism by which bio mechanically an injury could occur to a person, in other words, how do the forces basically create injury to a person and what are the injuries that one would expect to sustain as a result of a motor vehicle collision. Although a whole bunch of injuries could occur to a person involved in a collision, I'll walk you through some of the things that you can expect, or be looking for, for injuries sustained when you're involved in a collision.

The first is if I'm a driver sitting here in the car and I'm involved in front end collision. Typically, I'm going to have both hands on the steering wheel. Although it happens so quick it’s possible that I may only have one hand on the wheel, but oftentimes two is commonplace. People will oftentimes brace for impact, if they have any time to respond at all. You only have a split second to make that decision and maybe a second to put the body in the motion to brace for a collision that's unavoidable. You're also going to have your foot on the brake, if you can get your foot over there fast enough to get it on the brake. At the time of impact obviously your body is going forward, and you have a seat belt on, if that’s true, and it can brace you from going forward too far. But there are situations where it does happen quickly enough, and the belt doesn't grab, and you can hit your head on the steering wheel. You can also have problems with wrist injuries. If the airbag deployed, and typically will be deployed in a front-end impact but depending if it's offset by a little bit or an under-ride where the car goes under the vehicle or and override where the rider is over the top of the vehicle in front of them. If it's a smaller vehicle and more over the top, sometimes the airbag doesn't fire.

If the airbag fires, it comes out typically in two stages at 200 miles an hour, it's a double burn on the airbag, and it's going to hit you right in the face, which could knock you out. You might sustain a head injury that way, or you may also sustain a head injury by your head hitting the steering wheel. It's also possible that you can come up out of your seat depending if your car is diving forward and goes underneath that your head can come up and hit the bar across the top of the vehicle and throw you back in your seat. If you're stopped before your head goes to the ceiling the seat belt still is pulling on your shoulder and it's very common to have shoulder injuries. Of course, your neck is sustaining, maybe three gravitational forces greater than the rest of your body is the same because the head when it's flying forward is creating more g-force on your neck, which increase the probability of an injury to you neck.

You have you have joints on each side of your jaw called the temporomandibular joints and in the event of a high-speed impact, you can easily tear one or both of those joints in your jaw which later necessitate surgery to reduce the pain.

You don’t have to hit your head to have traumatic brain injuries because it's well documented that the forces of acceleration and deceleration are sufficient in an automobile collision to create a severe concussion, which is also referred to as a mild traumatic brain injury without hitting your head. However, if you do hit your head, then the probabilities of a brain injury are increased dramatically. Some of the symptoms from a head injury are nausea, dizziness, vomiting, ringing in the ears, blurry vision, loss of consciousness (even if it's for a brief period of time). After the initial impact and injury, as you start progressing through your treatment, be aware that some of the symptoms of a head injury that you want to be looking for:
Do you have any loss of short-term memories (forgetting things like your keys, forgetting the coffee pot is on, etc) when you did have those problems before the impact? Those are things that are short term memory loss issues.
If you begin experiencing anxiety and becoming fearful of being out on the road again those are signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This can be induced due to any type of traumatic stress event such as a car collision. It’s not relegated only to the military.