How does your body sustain damage from a crash even when your car doesn’t?

Is it possible for a person to get injured in a car crash even when the vehicle doesn’t sustain any damage? Even if the answer is yes, auto insurance providers, for the benefit of the shareholders, do not agree with the fact. Most of them argue that as the body of the car is visibly intact, there is no way you could have been injured. This is just a generalization, but most people who’ve been involved in an accident agree that auto insurers often come up with ‘weird’ reasons just to avoid paying a claim. Such cases are tough to fight, and unfortunately, leave many victims high and dry to deal with the suffering of permanent injuries. According to car accident doctors, more than 300,000 people suffer from debilitating pain owing to auto accident injuries. Such injuries may lead to disability and prolonged pain if you do not receive the right sort of care after a car crash.

Putting Theory into Practice

TJ Szabo and JB Welcher conducted a study titled “Human Subject Kinematics and Electromyographic Activity During Low Speed Rear Impacts” to investigate the effects of a car crash on the human frame. They used live test volunteers who were subjected to a series of 10 mph crashes. The test vehicles did not suffer any structural damage. High-speed sensors and cameras were used to record the entire incident and acceleration of the cervical and lumbar spine. Owing to variations regarding gender, weight, size, height, and build, the outcomes of the research showed how the cervical spine accelerated dramatically and experienced forces ranging from 6.6g to 17.2g through the neck. On the lumbar region, the acceleration force was anywhere between 3.9g to 7.5g.  They also collected data regarding the production of acceleration before any muscle activity occurred, thereby proving that the motion was complete even before the protective muscles around the spinal cord and the spine could react and protect the body from harm.

What Does This Mean?

If a person happens to be aware of the accident beforehand, they might try to guard themselves and prepare for the impending impact, considerably decreasing the extent of the injury. However, during a real car crash, when a person gets rear-ended without any prior knowledge, the collision tends to cause a lot more damage. The muscles in the body are not strong enough to hold the head in position, thus leading to a whipping motion of the head. Such a powerful and sudden motion has the potential to cause tremendous damage to the ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Thus, in the aftermath of the crash, it is common to experience problems like neck and shoulder pain, jaw pain, and headaches. A victim sustains all these problems whereas the actual vehicle involved in the crash remains unharmed.

Extent of the Damage

Have you ever wondered why someone who’s drunk and behind the wheel often escapes mostly unhurt after a crash? The reason behind this is simple – more often than not, they’re the ones causing the accident. The entire trauma of the crash is absorbed by the car being hit. Car accident doctors who’ve been in business for years mention how they’ve seen drivers suffer unnecessarily from whiplash type injuries that have led to severe brain damage. Not many are aware of the fact that the average human head has the potential to accelerate more than 17 times the force of gravity, resulting in widespread permanent health problems.

When someone is involved in a serious accident, the force of the crash occurs within mere seconds, which is time enough to create a harsh brain injury and cause extreme damage to the essential organs of the body.

Detection of Injury

Brain injuries sustained from a vehicle collision can range from mild to severe in intensities. The less critical ones are not always evident and can escape detection by even the most trained doctors. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the number of brain injuries occurring due to auto accidents is close to almost 7 million annually. Thus, one out of every 40 citizens is susceptible to traumatic brain injury. However, many such injuries are often hard to diagnose which is why these are considered to be silent killers.

A rear-end collision is not very uncommon. The victims of such accidents mostly sustain minor to moderate physical damage and then experiencing various symptoms such as back pain, headaches, and neck pain. The only way to find out if a car crash victim has suffered more complex but apparently unnoticeable injuries is to visit car accident doctors immediately after the accident. These doctors are trained to handle the problem of auto injuries and are capable of spotting any traumatic injuries to your brain – whether mild or severe.

When a person receives a brain injury from a car accident, it is rather easy to understand. The human brain is soft, while the skull is extremely tough which makes the brain a lot more susceptible to damage. The brain basically sloshes around within the confines of the skull, and so when the head experiences a sudden, forceful impact, some axons end up getting sheared, which ultimately is responsible for brain damage. People who’ve received traumatic brain injuries tend to experience a loss of consciousness during the time of the car crash. They might even feel groggy or nauseous when they attempt to remember the details about the accident. No matter how minor an injury to the brain is, timely and proper treatment is necessary to prevent any permanent damage and long-term symptoms.

If you have been involved in an automobile crash, it is imperative that you care for your wellbeing and get in touch with a car accident doctor who is specially trained and experienced to detect this silent epidemic. If you receive proper care on time, it might prevent the health situation from deteriorating and help save your life in the long run.

How does your body sustain damage from a crash even when your car doesn’t?

To sustain hope while preserving honesty is the greatest challenge in oncology | Ranjana Srivastava

“You know I am going to beat this.”

“No, you aren’t,” I think despondently.

“With a positive attitude and determination,” he adds.

“Then you’d be the first,” I silently retort.

A successful retired engineer, he is one of those who don’t fall ill until catastrophe strikes.

He had gone to the doctor feeling vaguely unwell and inherited a cancer diagnosis, and with it, an endless series of investigations. For a while, his surgeon sat on the fence – although the primary abdominal cancer was technically operable he had a hunch that the tiny, indeterminate nodules on the lung represented metastases.

“Why won’t my surgeon operate?”

“Because he doesn’t think he can cure you.”

“Do you think he is being too cautious?”

“No, I think he is looking after your best interests.”

His dogged determination refuses to consider the nuances I keep putting forward.

“I’ll do everything in my capacity to help you,” I say.

“I know you will. We’ll beat this together.”

“We may not be able to,” I respond, running away from the battle metaphor.

Unlike other patients, he doesn’t question my judgment or warn me off discussing bad news. He isn’t aggressive or demanding, in fact the opposite. Being a logical man, he doesn’t believe in miracles. But he just has an unshakeable belief that I am his companion in the fight of his lifetime and with me on his side, he can win.

I look across the desk at my well-dressed, thoroughly organised, thoughtfully spoken, impeccably mannered patient and ask myself how I am going to convince him that he has months to live.

I look at his wife searchingly. How does she regard his maniacal self-belief?

He starts chemotherapy and the remarkable response surprises everyone. Moreover, he suffers none of the anticipated toxicities, prompting him to grin, “Are you sure it’s not placebo you’re giving me?” Patients ask this from time to time, belying a real fear that their doctor has given up, so I answer seriously, “I promise you, I am treating you with the most intensive cocktail available.”

“Then why am I not sick?”

“Isn’t that great?”

“We will overcome this!”

I look at his wife searchingly. How does she regard his maniacal self-belief? Will she help me inject reason into the conversation? But she doesn’t utter a word, as if reminding me that the doctor-patient relationship is between me and her husband.

The surgeon calls me to say that he has finally ruled out the prospect of surgery. “He does realise he is having palliative chemo, right?” The surgeon’s mild exasperation mingles with mine, threatening to overflow at the next visit.

As I take a minute to collect my thoughts, I find myself wishing that my patient would say just once, “Yes, I understand I have an incurable disease.” We don’t have to talk about prognosis, compare patients, or dwell on anything other than how great he feels but the acknowledgement would take a burden off my shoulders. 

As these thoughts toss through my mind, my vague discomfort suddenly finds form in a single question, as if posed by an outside observer who is fed up of my attitude.

“Why does his relentless optimism bother you so much?”

I answer my invisible interlocutor with gusto.

“It bothers me because it makes me feel like I haven’t sufficiently explained things to him and maybe, he has taken my silence to mean assent. It bothers me that one day, when his disease inevitably progresses, he will blame me for concealing the truth. It bothers me that his death will be fraught because how will we cross over from joking about placebo to accepting mortality?”

The invisible interlocutor retorts, “But how you deal with your fear and conflict isn’t your patient’s responsibility.”

Stung by the realisation, I face my patient again.

“I’m determined to beat this,” he repeats.

“You know what, that would be truly wonderful,” I answer with a smile, suppressing all my dread and discomfort.

Something in me relents and something in him revels. The next few months are blissful, devoid of rancour and competition. He directs the conversation; I lose the urgency to say anything to tip our fragile balance. When I feel a stab of anxiety about the future, I remind myself that my greatest value to him may be in not undermining hope.

To sustain hope while preserving honesty – this is the greatest challenge in oncology. 

Oncologists attract much disdain from other doctors and patients for withholding bad news, twisting facts and distracting patients from dying well. Studies show that the majority of patients with advanced cancer don’t know that their life is limited and that treatment is not curative. 

Other studies highlight the anxiety and distress faced by patients and their carers when there is confusion surrounding the future and when oncologists don’t play a role in helping shed the uncertainty. But just like cancer represents many different diseases, cancer patients represent many different kinds of people, each with their own needs, longings and expectations. To address them all in one tone would be as pointless as treating all cancers with one drug. Grief has no arc.

Just as I’d feared all along, the cheer dissipates but what takes away my breath is how quickly it happens. One week he is well and the next week he’s glowing yellow with liver failure and in pain. I am dismayed.

“I can do a scan if you want but clearly things look worse.”

I brace myself for the onslaught of protest with a reminder that this is the price of the preceding months of bonhomie. But I am wrong again. He regards the numbers, looks at me, and says as calmly as if discussing the weather, “So this is it, then?”

Tears prick my eyes. Looking at his pale face and sleepless eyes, I yearn to have his old, ebullient self back, the self that wanted to challenge nature itself. I am tempted to lend him some of his hope back but all I can muster is, “I am really sorry.”

He sits there for a while, his face a kaleidoscope of emotions.

“I can’t thank you enough for the way you have held me up,” he finally says. “I’ve always appreciated your honesty.”

He’s got the wrong person in mind, I think dully as I recount my endless quest to save him from his delusions. His humility astounds me, giving rise to a tide of frustration at yet another death at the hands of some invisible, unrelenting process that neither my patient understood nor I could genuinely explain.

The next week, at an unscheduled visit, he looks terrible.

As I write a morphine prescription, he mentions he is pleased to have the beehives sorted.

“What beehives?” I ask, wondering what else I don’t know about him.

“If I can manage the travel, I’ll show you.” He hesitates, then hugs me. I know I won’t see him again.

Defying progressive symptoms, he assiduously ties up loose ends and gives away various belongings. Then, he surprises me one last time by making a final trip to hospital.

I stare at the gleaming jars of honey, pale gold, painstakingly decorated and wrapped, finally understanding just how hard he must have worked to finish the intricate undertaking.

It turns out only one of us was in denial and it wasn’t the patient.

To sustain hope while preserving honesty is the greatest challenge in oncology | Ranjana Srivastava

Poll displays assistance for raising taxes to sustain NHS

The NHS could encounter a funding gap of £30bn by the finish of the decade. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Getty Pictures

Voters stay wedded to Britain’s taxpayer-funded model of healthcare even as NHS leaders query its sustainability, according to a Guardian/ICM poll.

Analysis by NHS England and by outdoors authorities factors to a huge funding gap that could reach £30bn by the finish of the decade, and final month 71 health services major lights wrote to the Guardian to warn politicians that failure to level with the public about the black hole just before polling day would jeopardise the service’s potential.

Asked how they would tackle the potential funding of medicine, voters are resolved by a margin of more than two to a single that “raising taxes for everyone, to put much more income in” is the appropriate way to go.

Tax-funded increases in expenditure are preferred by 48% of respondents, even though 21% who rather countenance expenses, such as paying to see the medical professional, and 19% think it would be greater to reduce back on the assortment of offered treatments.

On the face of it, these outcomes supply some support for the suggestion – debated in Labour circles – of going into the election pledging a ringfenced national insurance coverage rise to cover NHS spending.

Assistance for higher taxes rises to 60% among Labour voters and 61% between Lib Dems. But Ed Miliband remains decidedly wary, ruling out any “huge” paying rise just lately, not least since prolonged Labour experience suggests that voters are sometimes far more ready to assistance greater taxes in view polls than at the ballot box.

Poll benefits

Asked to pinpoint the principle supply of the strain on NHS funding, 33% highlight “growing numbers of frail previous men and women”, and twenty% “way of life diseases” linked with consuming and weight problems.

Voters would consider some persuading that a modify of administration would dramatically alter both of these, but a substantial minority (17%) believes that the “coalition’s marketplace-based overhaul” of the system is the principle problem – like 20% of individuals who backed the Lib Dems in 2010 and 27% of recent minority supporters, indicating that the opposition could stand to acquire if it can push health up the agenda.

An additional 14% blame self-serving medics a lot more interested in shell out cheques than sufferers, and 9% see a problem with “the incorrect kinds of hospitals and clinics, in the wrong areas”. This suggests that the public is unlikely to be enthused by fresh strategies to take on the professions or reconfigure services in the way that some authorities recommend.

Pressed on what they think could be tolerably rationed, voters are emphatic in saying that heart bypasses (97%), hip replacements (94%) and post-accident facial reconstruction (91%) need to often be offered. There is also powerful majority support for “costly cancer drugs that may possibly extend daily life by a handful of months” (70%) and for IVF remedy (60%).

On IVF there is an fascinating age split, with only 40% of the 65-plus age group supporting its provision, compared with 78% of those aged 18-24, which calls into query the trendy thesis that younger voters are disinclined to assistance expansive welfare providers.

Even so, a lot of much more previous (56%) than youthful (37%) voters indicate that they would be content to see taxes rise to bail out the wellness support as a whole.

The one particular discipline the place the public is inclined to help restrictions on provisions is the one particular in which the NHS rationing body, Wonderful, final week indicated that the services need to be inclined to do more. Nice proposed offering gastric band surgical treatment to any obese individual with type-two diabetes who demands it. Voters, by contrast, are inclined – by a margin of 60% to 35% – to think that this is one therapy that need to not be automatically funded.

• ICM Investigation interviewed a random sample of 1,000 grownups aged 18-plus by phone on 11-13 July 2014. Interviews have been carried out across the country and the outcomes have been weighted to the profile of all grownups. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its principles.

Poll displays assistance for raising taxes to sustain NHS

Hospitals have to quit supplying particular companies or shut to sustain NHS – MPs

Sir David Nicholson, NHS England chief executive. The NHS welcomed the report, noting that it had quoted him on the troubles of integration. Photograph: David Levene

Some hospitals must cease delivering particular solutions or even shut altogether if the NHS is to remain viable, even however such alterations are “notoriously controversial”, an influential group of MPs warns right now.

The Commons overall health pick committee stated in a report that a dramatic expansion of the centralisation of hospital solutions was needed to help the NHS cope with the rising pressures on its budget.

In a report on the finances of the NHS and social care, the MPs say that integrating the presently separate services, which ministers and NHS leaders say is crucial for the NHS to stay sustainable in the face of increasing demand induced by ageing, “will also require reconfiguration”.

In a recognition of the controversy this kind of proposals create and the stress MPs feel underneath to oppose a rundown of their local hospital, the MPs say: “Advocating service integration with no recognising that the consequence of integration is reconfiguration of acute solutions … is simply dishonest.”

There is an “urgent require to increase the tempo and scale of support reconfiguration in the health and care program,” they add. A series of mergers amongst hospitals is required but is becoming held up by fears that such proposals will be blocked by the Office of Honest Trading and Competitors Commission, the report adds.

Although “modifications [that] closure of hospitals or remove solutions from hospitals … are notoriously controversial with neighborhood communities”, that is frequently since the case for them has been poorly manufactured.

Public consent would enhance if NHS leaders nationally and locally became much better at explaining how rationalisation of services can enhance the outcomes patients experience, which consist of better survival costs and fewer deaths, the MPs suggest.

NHS England, which runs the support, welcomed the MPs’ findings. “The committee is right to highlight the scale of the challenge in delivering overall health and social care integration. The report estimates [NHS England chief executive] Sir David Nicholson making this quite stage to the method in October last 12 months,” said a spokeswoman.

The MPs also get the NHS to process for not pushing by means of “transformative change” in the way providers are delivered to sufferers in their bid to make the £20bn of cost savings by 2015 essential by the “Nicholson Challenge” efficiency drive.

Funding for social care, which has been slashed by numerous nearby councils in current many years in spite of increasing require, need to be ringfenced otherwise “there is a severe risk to both the top quality and availability of care companies to vulnerable individuals in the years ahead.” Lack of social-care assistance is a significant trigger of bedblocking in NHS hospitals.

The NHS produced £5.8bn of cost savings in 2011-twelve and £5bn in 2012-13. But it is most likely to have saved only a even more £4bn by the end of subsequent month, 15% beneath the target for 2013-13, the MPs found.

Whilst significantly of the cost savings so far have come from shell out restraint imposed on NHS personnel, which includes a two-yr pay out freeze, that will not be ample to meet the £20bn target, they include. Jeremy Hunt, the overall health secretary, who has aksed the NHS shell out assessment entire body to cancel the 1% rise previously promised to all NHS employees by George Osborne, simply because the service are not able to afford it, has presently accepted the committee’s see on that.

Hospitals have to quit supplying particular companies or shut to sustain NHS – MPs