Why Rear-End Collisions Cause More Injuries Than People Think
If you ask someone who just got rear-ended at a stoplight how bad it was, they’ll probably describe the bumper. A scuff, a cracked reflector, maybe no damage at all. If you ask again two days later, they might tell you it hurts just backing out of their driveway.
Rear-end collisions fool people that way. The car looks fine. The bumper might have a small dent or a few scuffs. So, everyone assumes the driver is fine, including the driver. People are busy, so they skip going to the doctor and take the first number an insurance company offers. Plenty of them never call a Star Valley car accident lawyer about what they see as a classic fender bender.
Here’s why rear-end collisions cause more injuries than people think, which injuries take the longest to manifest themselves, and how insurers use a clean bumper against you.
Why Low-Speed Impact Injuries Happen in Cars That Look Fine
When another car strikes yours from behind, your vehicle lurches forward, and the seat shoves your back and shoulders along with it. For a split second your head stays where it was, which bends your neck backward, and then it snaps forward. Mayo Clinic describes whiplash the same way and names rear-end crashes as its most common cause.
A slow crash can still be a sudden one, and it’s the suddenness that injures the neck.
Federal safety rules require a passenger car’s bumper system to survive a 2.5 mph hit to the front or rear without damage to its lights, hood, trunk, doors, brakes, or steering. The rule exists to limit damage to the vehicle. Nothing in it measures what happens to the people inside, so a bumper that comes through without a mark held up like it should. But the force that didn’t dent the bumper still jerked the car far forward, and you went with it.
Why You Felt Fine at the Scene
Whiplash symptoms most often start within days of the injury, according to Mayo Clinic. The worst of it tends to reveal itself after you’ve already told people you’re fine. Delayed symptoms after a car accident can include:
- Neck pain and stiffness, worse when you turn your head
- Headaches starting at the base of the skull
- Pain in the shoulders, upper back, or ams
- Tingling or numbness in the arms
- Dizziness and fatigue
These soft tissue damage symptoms are easy to blame on a bad pillow, and back pain after a rear-end hit gets written off as a long day. Cervical strain recovery time also varies more than people expect. Most people with whiplash feel better within a few weeks, but some live with pain for months or years.
That’s why the doctor’s visit you keep putting off matters doubly. It gets you treated, plus it creates the first medical record linking your injury to the crash. You meant to call on Monday. Then work got hectic, the kids had practice, and your neck felt a little better in the morning. A week later, the insurance company has a question waiting for you: If you were really hurt, why didn’t you see a doctor?
You Don’t Have to Hit Your Head to Hurt Your Brain
The CDC lists a hit to the body that sends the head and brain quickly back and forth as one cause of concussion, which is a mild traumatic brain injury. The brain can get jolted inside the skull while damaging its own cells. When the brain strikes one side of the skull and bounces into the other, doctors call that a coup-contrecoup injury.
These are the most difficult injuries to spot after car crashes because some concussion symptoms might not arrive for days, according to the CDC. Meanwhile, trouble concentrating, headaches, irritability, and poor sleep can just as easily be connected to stress. A clean CT scan won’t necessarily rule out a concussion, either, because scans are used mainly to check for bleeding on the brain.
Most people recover from mild concussion symptoms within a couple of weeks. Still, the CDC warns that someone with a concussion might not recognize their own symptoms. If your spouse says you’ve been short-tempered since the crash, or you keep losing your train of thought at work, tell your doctor.
The Fender-Bender Defense
Photos of a car with barely a scratch give the other driver’s insurance company an easy way to argue that nobody got hurt. The adjuster isn’t being malicious. A photo of an undamaged bumper is the simplest evidence in the file, and it happens to point toward a smaller compensation check. An insurance claim for a rear-end accident should rise or fall on your medical records and treatment timeline. These say more about your neck than a slightly dented bumper or a repair estimate will.
Wyoming car accident lawyers require drivers to leave a following distance that’s reasonable for their speed, the traffic, and the road conditions. On an icy Star Valley morning, that means leaving a lot more room. Insurers could still try to shift blame onto you by pointing to a sudden stop you made or a burned-out brake light. Wyoming’s comparative fault law means that any share of fault assigned to you reduces your recovery by that percentage. If your share of fault rises above 50 percent, you get nothing.
Also, if the other driver’s insurer asks for a recorded statement while you’re still telling people you feel fine, talk to a lawyer first.
The Damage You Can’t See Still Counts
A rear-end crash can leave your car untouched and leave you with an injury that takes days to announce itself. The insurance company will want to talk about the bumper. You need someone who keeps the conversation on you.
At Edwards Law Office, P.C., our attorneys have made Etna home, and Jack Edwards has practiced law in Wyoming for more than 20 years. He knows how to work with insurance companies, and our small firm gives every client personal attention. Whether you’re pursuing whiplash injury compensation or living with a concussion that hasn’t cleared, reach out to our firm for a free consultation.
Your bumper was built for this. Your head and neck were not.