Car Damage and Risk of Injury

Author: Joshua Brabant

If the insurance company is telling you that your car damage is minimal and therefore, your bodily injuries also must be minimal and of little value or consequence, you should read this article.

In Dr. Arthur Croft’s article, Study Confirms Flaws in Standard Defense Strategy for MVC Injury, he states, that “motor vehicle collisions are a leading cause of injury in the U.S. [and] with 3 million such injuries each year, a total recovery proportion of only about 50 percent, a permanent disability proportion of 10-12 percent, coupled with the fact that many of the injured are young and have many quality life years to lose, the $43 billion annual price tag is hardly surprising.”

Dr. Croft indicates that many insurance companies do whatever they can to limit their liability and states that”with Allstate taking the vanguard position with their now famous three D’s-delay, deny and defend-most major auto insurers have since instituted similar policies, and the plaintiff persona injury bar has more often withered than weathered.”

Dr. Croft contends that the reason they are able to employ these strategies of deception, dissimulation and obfuscation, is that “a team of experts from the fields of medicine (including chiropractic), accident reconstruction and biomechanics … have collectively developed what I consider to be the standard defense strategy.”

Dr. Croft contends that insurance companies have the “best researchers money can buy and they know how to get it published.” He discusses the main strategy of the defense is to “demonstrate that the forces of the collision would not have been of a sufficient magnitude to cause injury.” The terminology for this impact is known as the plaintiff vehicles’s delta V or change in velocity. Dr. Croft indicates that insurers will typically employ the use of accident constructionists to write a report and hire a biomechanist to offer his opinion on injury risk.

Dr. Croft states that even though these experts “provide a very polished and seemingly airtight argument based on what appear to be sound mathematical principles and classical Newtonian physics [it would be] very interesting…if it had the additional virtue of being true.”

It was shown in a study where they took 57 people within 48 hours of their car accident and in all the cases a trained engineer determined the delta V by “examining both crash vehicles…[and considered] the Neck Disability Indexes[and] no significant correlation between the NDI and delta V and no correlation between whiplash grade and delta V.

The study also showed that there was “no lower threshold below which a large proportion would predictably not be injured, nor was there an upper threshold above which most would predictably be injured. This was because some people were injured in very low velocity crashes while others were not injured despite fairly high velocity crashes.” Therefore the authors of the study indicated that “it can be concluded that delta V is an irrelevant predictive value for cervical spine injury after MVA.”

Dr. Crofts sums up by saying “In the end, when essential parts of the foundation of the defense strategy are tested, they repeatedly fail to hold up to the scrutiny of hard science. In a court of law, however, if the plaintiff and their experts cannot effectively present the real facts and rebut the junk science, 12 impressionable jurors will decide the outcome of the case.”

Therefore, if the insurance companies are not dealing with you fairly when you have pain and telling you that the vehicle damage was minimal and therefore your injuries have little to no value, think twice before settling without consulting an attorney. If you need help with a car accident, or any other personal injury issues, please call the car accident attorneys at Brabant & Huynh LLP at 617-934-0913 for your personal injury where we are located in Quincy and Dorchester and we will be glad to help you evaluate your case and ease the burden of going through the process.