Or has some good meds.
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You’d have to test dozens of the SAME used car because each of those new cars could be different in different ways…(mileage, ways it was driven, previous accidents, overall condition…etc…etc)
That’s what I was trained to do and a requirement for my work in the past 40+ years.
Of course I do. But I suppose a car company encouraging new car sales is a conspiracy.
Here is a high speed head on crash involving a Prius with 5 people in it. Out of 6 people total, one woman in the Prius is the sole survivor. Are women really paying the price?
It looks like the Prius hit a wall at 60 to 70 MPH.
So what you’re saying is that the seat belt load limiter must have failed on the woman’s side, and that saved her life?
BTW, I know this isn’t going to faze you, but just in case someone impressionable reads this bunk, your one anecdote does not cancel out statistics.
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Those pesky sexist crash test dummies 
.
I don’t think they can account for ALL the variables in size or shape of the population. For the driver, the dummies should be some average weight. Not sure what that weight would be. I looked up the average weight of an American adult and got 181 lbs, male and female combined. 181 lbs would be a realistic weight for a non overweight adult male. So, maybe they’re using the correct dummy after all?
Of course there will be 5’2, 110 lb women, and there’ll be 6’4, 300 lb men as outliers. It would make crash test ratings a little more complicated and harder to interpret if they didn’t stick to some “standard” size / weight driver, in my opinion. I think the lady who wrote the article must’ve just needed a topic that day.
NO ONE (doctors, nurses, NPs,PAs and others) is allowed to browse charts at random. If they have a legitimate medical reason to look at a chart they are allowed to. They may look also if they are part of an approved study that has gone through the Institutional Review Board. Electronic medical records log every instance of opening and people found to be inappropriately opening charts are often sanctioned, including with job loss. I think criminal sanctions are imposed rarely.
Assuming you are serious… You can’t get real-life (or real-death) data on car crashes involving cars that have not yet been sold, or are newly released with few crashes to report. In addition, there would be no way to be sure the data you had was similar in various crashes. Cars need to be tested and manufacturers need to supply the cars. Except for niche builders this is not a major expense. I’d rather pay for this in the price of a car (as we do now) than pay for its absence in medical expenses.
This was a terribly tragic accident, but I did not see a mention of seatbelt use, so it is hard to draw conclusions.
believe it or not, I’m fully aware of HIPAA (and other related privacy laws) and what I and others are and are not able to do. MD/PA-C/CRNP due to continuity of care, signing charts later, etc will have the opportunity to review those charts (and other reasons besides those that we’ve both listed, because the ER will usually ask about a patient that was taken to surgery by Trauma and whatnot). I don’t unless I’m working on some type of data collection project. Yes inappropriate access can cause write ups, suspension, and termination. Criminal charges can be pressed, however that usually won’t happen unless you do something incredibly stupid like posting a patient’s PHI (protected health information) on social media or something like that.
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On a side note. healthcare workers are not being thanked enough for their service. so… THANK YOU.
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“believe it or not, I’m fully aware of HIPAA (and other related privacy laws)”
I am sure you are aware of the rules and laws, and respect them. I wanted other, non-medical, readers to be aware of them to understand that their data are safe and not being reviewed for purposes other than their treatment. This could be an issue especially in a smaller town where neighbors of a patient could be working in the ER or other areas.
And whatever your role is in the ER, thank you for doing it, as they very difficult places to work! (Ah, I saw after I posted this that the commenter above also thanked you!).
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Dear Auto-Owner,
I wonder if you would feel this way if a “loved family member” owned and was still drove a 1975 Pinto.
If they had performed a Rear-End Crash test on the Ford Pinto and the Mercury Bobcats, Ford/Mercury would not have gotten away with knowing that the Pinto and Bobcats would explode and decide that the cost of a recall repair was more expensive than the legal judgements against the company…
Although there were only 27 confirmed deaths caused by the explosions, there were many more who victims who just burned to death without an explosion…
In sum, the cost of recalling the Pinto and Bobcats was estimated to cost $121 million, whereas paying off the victims only cost Ford/Mercury $50 million.
I hope your cynical attitude doesn’t bite you in the butt as you seem to be…
So, keep your recalled Takata Airbags in your car with the recalled Firestone 500 tires and I’ll keep checking obituaries…
Happy Motoring…
The only thing you can be sure of is that anyone who didn’t have a seatbelt on died.
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It’s not the weight, it’s the distribution. As a whole, women tend to have their weight distributed lower, in the hip area, while men have more weight distribution canted toward the chest area.
What this means is that if you design a restraint system solely for men, you’d tend to design more of the weight capture higher up, which works great until someone with a more hip-centric weight distribution sits in the seat.
This is a problem, and it’s one that needs to be addressed, but it’s not a conspiracy. The car makers / government are not trying to expose women to greater injury. They’re just putting blinders on and not seeing that there’s a problem.
The point is that not every problem we face is the result of some nefarious plot to cause the problem. However, absence of a conspiracy does not absolve us from trying to address a problem.
What would they need to do in order to rectify this problem? Lower the weight in the dummies downward? Then they’d theoretically make the cars less safe for men. Have female driver and male driver models of cars? Have male and female crash test ratings? I realize men and women are proportioned differently, but we aren’t THAT different are we? We both have heads, torsos, arms, legs…and vehicles generally only have restraints around the chest, waist, and head.
The article stated that the tests use a 5’9”, 170 lb dummy. “We have much less info about how a car would perform with a 5’2”, 110 lb woman.” Sure, we have much less info about how a 6’3”, 220 lb male would fare in an accident too. If they designed vehicles around 5’2”, 110 lb women (or men), they’d be designing it for a relatively low percentage of drivers.
Throw a 5’9”, 170 lb “female proportioned” dummy in the mix if you want. I don’t think there’d be much difference in how it fares vs the “male proportioned” dummy they’re apparently using now.
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In the kinds of forces generated in a collision - especially a head-on which can have impact velocities north of 100mph pretty easily - small differences can play an outsized role. I suspect it’s not an either-or design question. We can design a restraint system that protects a wider range of body types, we just haven’t.
Some of it is cost, yes. The most effective crash mitigation tech involves seat inserts that are custom-molded to the individual’s body. That works well for astronauts, but would be horribly impractical for regular people. Especially since regular people tend to go up and down in weight, sometimes enough that they’re changing clothing sizes, and that would mean they need a new seat insert.
But some of it is simply inertia. We’ve always designed with this set of assumptions, and we aren’t going to stop now. While we aren’t going to be doing custom enclosures for drivers any time soon, we could redesign the idea of the seat belt such that it offers better protection. Maybe move up from the standard 3-point into 4? Yeah, you’d have to reinforce the roof for that, but that’s probably something that should be done regardless.
The low percentage thing is a bit of a red herring. We aren’t talking weight differences here - a system that can restrain a 200 pound weight can also restrain a 100 pound weight. We’re talking about weight distribution differences. If we designed a more universal restraint system then we could capture close to 100% of body types versus the 50-odd percent we’re capturing now.
But, again, and given some of the folks participating in this thread I feel it almost necessary to reiterate this with every post, it’s corporate laziness and apathy that’s preventing this research. It is not a car company conspiracy to kill or harm women.
If the same system can restrain a 200 lb weight and a 100 lb weight safely, I do not see how “weight distribution differences” within those vast total weight differences isn’t a red herring. That’s my take on it.
Sure, cars could be made safer. They could have racing seats and harnesses, etc. I just don’t think the “more weight in the hips” vs “more weight in the chest” is going to matter much.
Could be wrong. I’m not a physicist or an engineer.
I appreciate it guys (and thankfully NOT a doctor or provider @andyw77_155343, I would not want that responsibility at this time). This forum gives me not only a chance to learn something new, but a welcomed distraction between patient interviews. It’s a rough time in healthcare right now and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon, especially over the next month and a half. Stay safe folks, get your vaccines and boosters, and mask up until the worst of the wave is through (because we’re also already seeing way more influenza than we did last year).
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