Auto accidents that result from rear end impacts can cause lasting injuries to the driver and occupants of the car that was struck from the rear. Insurance adjusters who investigate and attempt to settle these cases will always look at the damage to the cars involved by either inspecting the cars involved in the car crash or by reviewing the photographs and damage appraisals of the involved vehicles. As a Palm Springs auto accident lawyer I always hear the same mantra from the insurance adjusters that the minimal damage to the cars proves that my clients could not have had any significant injuries caused by the subject accident.
In order to defeat legitimate claims by the innocent accident victims, the insurance companies and their lawyers will hire biomechanical experts that will use junk science to support their defense. In court in a typical Indio auto accident jury trial it is not unusual for the insurance company lawyer to show blow ups of photos of my clients car to try and convince the jury that the minimal damage depicted by the photos could not possibly cause the pain and suffering claimed by our Coachella Valley personal injury clients who are suing for their injuries caused by the insured defendant,
The fact remains that not all drivers who are rear-ended in low speed collisions are injured and conversely not all drivers whose cars are struck from the rear in a high speed rear-end crash receive long lasting injuries. You can have a situation in which the driver of a rear ended vehicle hit at a low speed can receive a chronic neck injury and the passenger sitting next to the driver can walk away from the accident without any injury. Although the forces generated by the impact are the same for both occupants the physiological make up of the two people are different which accounts for their varied physical responses to the accident.
Rear end accidents can cause excessive and unnatural motions of the head and neck that may exceed the tolerance levels of the involved muscles, ligaments and tendons and susceptible facet joints. These same forces and motions may cause the cervical disks of the neck to undergo stresses that cause harmful movement during the accident sequence.
The insurance industry are wont to rely heavily on misleading crash dummy tests in low impact rear end accident experiments to demonstrate that the so-called scientific evidence proves that these low speed crashes do not cause injury. They also test car crashes with cadavers and live volunteers to support their position that low impact rear end crashes do not cause injury. What is lacking in all these slanted experiments is a real world test using a live test subject who has the same physiological makeup as my injured client who I represent because they were in fact injured by a negligent Palm Springs driver who rear ended my client's car in an impact of less than 10 miles per hour. These insurance industry sponsored tests cannot be considered dispositive of the actual injury causing potential of low speed rear end accidents on humans because of the numerous differences between persons actually involved in accidents that happened unexpectedly and without a chance to brace for the impact. Also these tests cannot account for differences of age, gender, and pre-existing medical conditions of the accident victims. These medical conditions that may have pre-existed the real world accident can include genetic conditions, spondylolisthesis, spinal stenosis, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, and prior injuries that may have already created instability of the accident victim's spine and or prior bulging and herniated disks. The crash tests using live persons normally attract volunteers who are young, robust and otherwise healthy. Can you imagine using test subjects with a history of chronic neck or back complaints being part of the experiment?
Contact the lawyer at Barry Regar APLC today to review your auto accident case and learn if the, "friendly" insurance adjuster is taking advantage of you.