North Carolina car accident reporting is often confounded by too much reliance on bad statistics and hasty conclusions. We live in a “we need more content, stat 24/7” society, and the web is notoriously littered with flagrant marketing pitches disguised as legitimate information.

With so many seemingly useful channels of input coming into your world, how can you know whom to trust? How can you gain clarity? In other words, how do you know when you’re “doing enough” to take care of your problem? How do you know when you need to find more resources, do more research, or just generate more ideas about how to solve a particular problem?

Exposed to lot of information, but not trained effectively for how to use it

As children, we were taught basic rules of learning. We were taught to read, to write, and hopefully, to think critically. But we grew up – or at least most of us grew up – in an era before the web invaded every aspect of our life, education, and culture. As a result, we have certain skills that are essentially useless: who needs to memorize historical dates anymore, when you can find out that trivia instantly using your cell phone?

Meanwhile, we are lacking in certain skills that are essential for navigating the modern web. How do we organize different inputs? How do we prioritize? How do we time manage effectively? How do we discern truth from fiction? How do we know which “authorities” to trust, when, and on what subjects? There are strategies and tactics for dealing with these questions, but almost no one learns them in school. We are forced to find them, ad hoc, as we become adults. And this can be difficult when you are facing challenges with respect to a North Carolina car accident or workers’ compensation claim or any other problem.

After all, if you are just trying to figure out who won the World Series in 1984 (The Tigers) or how to clean your garage in ten easy steps, the web makes it ridiculously easy for you. If you are trying to deal with a more complex topic, the web can help, but it can also hinder. Answers to complex problems require expertise in many domains – and they also require a kind of integrated sense of the problem. But you need people to help you navigate this information, not just information itself.

The team here at the law offices of Michael DeMayo is keenly aware of the challenges and struggles that accident victims face. We can help you regain some clarity and a sense of control not only by giving you powerful legal representation but also by helping you in other aspects of your case and your life. After all, you are not just your case – you are an integrated person with integrated needs. Yes, you want compensation and justice. But even more than that, you want clarity, and you want to regain a sense of control. Let us help you.

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Information alone is not enough

Why people matter

Whether you recently were hurt in a North Carolina car accident, or a friend or relative was injured in a truck or motorcycle crash, you have been thinking about safety quite a lot. You’re keenly aware of the hazards that North Carolina roads present – both supposedly safe highways like Interstate 95 or unpaved rural roads out in the far western corners of the state. Sometimes, it’s helpful to identify what you don’t want to do to highlight what you want to achieve. To that end, here are seven things that you can do that will ratchet up your likelihood of getting into a significant North Carolina auto accident.

#1. Drive only during horrible weather.

Is it snowing outside? Sleeting? Is there a hurricane on the horizon? If so, hop in your vehicle and drive. Be sure to drive with broken windshield wipers, a car that hasn’t been tuned in months if not years, and on roads that you are utterly unfamiliar with.

#2. Consume massive amounts of pharmaceutical medications, drugs, alcohol, etc.

(Note: this is a joke – do not actually do this. Same goes for all of the comments in this article—do not actually attempt these crazy ideas!)

#3. Stay up as long as you can and then hop behind the wheel.

Studies conducted by the National Sleep Foundation and by Australian researchers show that extremely fatigued people — those who stay up for more than 24 hours in a row, for instance — are actually more impaired than DUI drivers.

#4. You hear a rattle in your engine? Ignore it.
See how long you can drive your car before it literally falls apart on the road. Did you notice any warning lights in your dashboard? Ignore those. Is your car billowing black smoke every time you take it on the road? Forget about it. Follow these habits of carelessness and disrespect for your automobile, and you will increase your likelihood of getting into an injury accident.

#5. Ignore your bad habits.

Do you have a tendency to speed, blow through a certain stop sign on your way to work, or get aggressive when you feel like another driver has just you cut you off? If so, keep that up. Ignore those red flags. Ignore the concerns of friends or family members. Ignore the traffic citations you get for driving while yapping on your cell phone or texting your friend. No need to wear a helmet while driving a motorcycle. No need to undergo extensive training if you are going to drive the big rig. No need to change if all your friends call you an angry, scary driver. Just keep doing what you are doing, and disaster will almost surely follow.

#6. Ignore signs of deteriorating health and vision.

If you are a senior driver, and you no longer can see the road — if you are driving at 20 mph because you are so scared of crashing — by all means, don’t seek an intervention. Keep going until you literally drive off the road due to your degradation of skills and capacity.

#7. If you’ve been in a North Carolina car accident, ignore the lessons that can be gleaned from that.

Blame it on the other guy. Pretend it didn’t happen. Or otherwise live in a state of denial about your rights and responsibilities.

So those are seven sure fire ways to make your life more miserable, endanger yourself and others on the road, and potentially lead get arrested and thrown in jail.

On the other hand, if you want to make smarter, more strategic decisions regarding a recent accident, connect with an experienced, highly respected North Carolina auto accident law firm, such as DeMayo Law.

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Hidden Dangers of the Road

Catalogue of Bad Drivers

What’s the link between chronic disease and car accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere? It’s an intriguing question – one that hasn’t been blogged about to death or discussed at length in the mainstream media. It’s no surprise that type 2 diabetes and associated diseases (e.g. obesity, Alzheimer’s disease) are on the rise in the United States. But when people talk about car accident safety – and crash prevention – they rarely, if ever, discuss how our diabetes/obesity epidemic (“diabesity epidemic”) might be creating hazards on the road.

Parsing the Statistics

Groups like the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration keep tabs on injury accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere. For instance, it’s a famously repeated fact that car accidents kill approximately 40,000 people on US roads annually. But if you look just at stats regarding injury accidents and property damage, you can easily get misled. DUI-related deaths might be down from 15 years ago, for instance, but what can we attribute that to? Are people just driving DUI less? Or are people driving DUI the same amount but getting into fewer accidents because of improved auto safety features or road engineering changes? With a system as complicated as the North Carolina highway system, you can never really be sure what changes cause what results because of the dynamism of the interacting variables.

This is a long way of getting at a key point: the dangers caused by the increasing number of diabetic North Carolinians behind the wheel may be masked by other changes to our driving habits and behaviors and proclivities!

For instance, it could be that diabetic drivers are slightly more likely to get into injury crashes due to diabetes-related fatigue or blood sugar issues. But maybe enhanced car safety features, such as antilock brakes and better airbags, mitigate the effects of the diabetes-induced errors. In other words, if you just look at the statistics, there is too much noise in the data for us to come to any conclusions.

On the other hand, common sense suggest that drivers who are diabetic and fatigued and who suffer from blood sugar swings — and who also might be on diabetes drugs and thus subject to side effects related to those drugs — might be riskier drivers. It would also then follow that, if we could figure out ways to reduce the number of North Carolinian diabetics– or improve the treatment for these diabetics – then we could make a subtle but not insignificant dent in the number and severity of car crashes!

Of course, that’s all a lot of speculation. Until we have hard science and good data, we can’t really make any conclusive statements.

Nevertheless, this idea of expanding our thinking can be useful, particularly if you or someone you care about is involved in a North Carolina car crash, and you are trying to figure out how and why the accident occurred and what you can do to get compensation and move on with your life. Step one is getting good help: connect with the Law Offices of Michael A DeMayo today for a free consultation.

More Web Resources:

How Does Diabetes Affect Performance?

Diabetes and Driving

North Carolina truck accidents can be devastating – far more so than typical auto or motorcycle accidents – due to the sheer size of the vehicles involved and the force differentials.

An 18-wheeler going up against a standard Sedan is in many ways the equivalent of a battle between David and Goliath… in which David inconveniently forgets his sling shot!

So what can you do to protect yourself and your family from dangerous encounters with big rigs and other scary vehicles? Here are two interesting concepts that can be food for thought – ideas that have not been necessarily explored at length on the internet.

1. Buy a bigger car or truck!

Car and truck accidents in North Carolina and beyond are dangerous because, during an accident, the force of the collision indirectly creates forces on your body, which causes injury. This is obvious enough. But the implication is very interesting. If you have two vehicles that are mismatched with respect to their masses, the larger massed vehicle will almost always “win” the fight. Not always but the odds are for it. So if you have a massive 18-wheel truck against a Honda Civic, the Civic is going to be the underdog. And the statistics bear this out. In a collision between trucks and lighter vehicles, the truck drivers often (not always, but often) come out more okay than do the auto drivers or auto passengers. By getting a larger vehicle with more mass, you, at least theoretically, might be at less of a physical disadvantage in an encounter with a truck.

2. Strategically reduce how much driving you do overall – particularly with respect to how much driving you do around trucks.

How much time do you spend really analyzing your driving behavior and patterns and proclivities? Do you keep a driving journal? Do you do this once a month, once a year? Have you ever done it? Most people have never ever thought to think about their driving!

But as the great management thinker, Peter Drucker, once said, what gets measured gets managed. If you don’t know when you might be at most risk for a collision — which highways that you take are the most dangerous, etc. — how can you know when you are most at risk? The answer is you can’t! Unless you track your driving habits.

So make a science out of it. You might think that it’s not worth your while. But consider that some statistics say that as many as 1 out of every 15 Americans will be involved in a serious car accident at some point in their lives. 40,000 people die every year on the U.S. roads. This is a very real and present issue. It’s worth your time to think about your driving habits.

Of course, there is always a degree of randomness and even unfairness when it comes to accidents. That’s why it’s important to protect your rights as quickly as possible after an event by calling a North Carolina truck accident law firm and getting good, actionable, advice from seasoned professionals.

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Keeping a journal about your driving habits

What gets measured get managed

You suffered whiplash or other musculoskeletal injuries after a North Carolina car crash. You obviously want to fix your medical problems ASAP, get compensated for your costs, and hold the careless or negligent driver to strict account for your bills and suffering. That’s a very rational and acceptable point of view.

But as you explore the diagnosis with your physician and work with a competent North Carolina car crash law firm to get the results you want, you may find it useful to read the counterintuitive (and certainly controversial) philosophy of New York based physician Dr. John Sarno. In Sarno’s bestselling books, such as “Healing Back Pain,” he proposes a very strange sounding thesis: namely, that many of our chronic muscular aches and pains can be traced back to our psychology. Sarno takes a Freudian view of the world. He postulates that, when we experience strong unpleasant emotions, like anger, fear, and frustration, we lack the psychological and verbal tools to express and expurgate these emotions. So instead, we embody them. We turn them into physical sensations in our body – we get knots in our back, we feel tight, breathing gets constricted, etc.

No one would deny that strong emotions can lead to physical reactions, at least in the short term. Everyone knows, for instance, that stress is unhealthy – particularly chronic stress. But Sarno takes this concept to the nth degree, in that he suggests that problems like North Carolina auto accident induced whiplash and carpal tunnel syndrome and a whole array of other conditions are actually perpetuated and perhaps even caused by these repressed emotions. Sarno’s idea is that, when the mind experiences unpleasant emotions, the brain essentially shuts off oxygen supply to certain muscles and soft tissue, creating very real physical problems called TMS (a.k.a. myofascial trigger points or just “muscle knots”). But essentially the emotional trauma causes the physical manifestation (muscle knots), which in turn cause the numbness, tingling, tightness, etc.

Sarno’s thesis is extremely hard for many people to believe – and let it be said that he is certainly way out of the mainstream. On the other hand, at least according to his internal records, his success rate for treating problems like back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome has been extremely high – higher than the average by far. And what’s spectacular about that is that, according to Sarno, the cure is the diagnosis. Once people “truly accept” that their pain is psychological instead of physical, their symptoms tend to resolve. Again, this all probably sounds preposterous if you’re first hearing about it. But you might want to educate yourself.

One of the interesting pieces of evidence that suggests that Sarno might be on to something comes out of Norway. Several years ago, scientists found that Norwegians experienced an epidemic of whiplash injuries… right after whiplash became an insurable and compensable injury. Some scientists thought that maybe the diagnosis of whiplash actually created more cases. So what they did was they went to Lithuania to look at victims of car accidents – comparable accidents to the ones the Norwegians suffered. They found that the Lithuanians basically had no whiplash symptoms at all as compared with controls.

This whiplash study set off a frenzy in the academic world of whiplash injury analysis, but the results are certainly intriguing and they seem to lend some support to Sarno’s thesis. If you are interested, you could check out the links below to learn more.

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The Gist of John Sarno’s TMS Theory

The Norwegian Lithuanian Whiplash Study

When we talk about North Carolina car accident prevention, we usually stick to the basics and to reality – we talk about technologies like airbags, ABS, seatbelts, etc. We analyze the effectiveness of these technologies and speculate about how we could deploy them more frequently and in better and cooler ways. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of thinking. But if you really want to make progress with North Carolina car accident prevention, you may need to go beyond the conventional ideas and really think about the nature of auto safety itself.

After all, auto safety is not just about technology! Nor is it just about driver behavior. Nor is it just about road engineering. Nor is it just about traffic control. Auto safety really is a broad discipline that can be affected — and can affect — many, many arenas of life. So when you look at improving auto safety just through the lens of “let’s build better technology to make people safer” you may be taking an overly narrow view of the subject.

There are undoubtedly many leverage points we could push on that would lead to better road safety. Improvements in driver behavior. Improvements in driver education and training. Improvements in road engineering. Improvements in automobile engineering. Improvements in the way that auto safety experts talk to one another and share solutions. Improvements in the science of auto safety and on and on.

But a more holistic appreciation of these factors is needed.

It’s needed not “real folks” — not just for the eggheads who come up with policies and write articles about this subject for public consumption. Driving can be a hugely perilous activity – as this blog and others have cited many times over, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration has estimated that 40,000 Americans die every year in car crashes… and millions are injured. This is a clear and present issue for all of us. We could probably benefit from knowing more about auto safety. Sure, it’s great to know that certain cars with ABS or with such and such kind of airbag are safer than other cars with different safety features. And yes: it’s good to be reminded of the fact that we need to keep our cars well maintained to avoid breakdowns like tire failures and faulty brakes. And it’s good to know that we shouldn’t be driving while overly fatigued or driving under the influence of alcohol or so forth.

But what ELSE might we be able to do to improve our safety consciousness – to protect ourselves and our loved ones out there? And perhaps, more interestingly, what “stuff” can we STOP doing that has really no affect on our safety – or a negative affect – and that costs us time and money and energy, only to give us a false sense of security?

This blog post obviously cannot answer all these questions. But it’s important to raise them and begin a more flourishing discussion about them, since so much is at stake for so many people.

That being said, if you’ve already been in an auto accident, you may benefit from talking with a North Carolina car accident law firm today.

An auto accident in North Carolina on Highway 52 (in King, NC) shook up the King Fire Department and sent Lieutenant Les Collins to Wake Forest Baptist Hospital with significant injuries. According to news reports, 59-year-old William Blythe drove into a coned off area and smashed into a fire department car before hitting the volunteer firefighter. The impact was so hard that it threw Collins 100 feet. Amazingly, he was not killed by the impact – news reports said he was listed at stable condition at the hospital.

Blythe was arrested and charged with reckless and careless driving. Interestingly, Blythe was only travelling at 30 miles per hour when he hit the firefighter. Thirty miles per hour may not seem like a lot. But it was clearly enough force to send the man flying 100 feet – a third the length of a football field.

Can we learn any lessons from this scary accident?

Lesson #1: Drivers can EASILY get confused and behave recklessly or carelessly. Even though the firefighters put up traffic cones and engaged other precautions “by the book,” the risk preparation was not enough to protect them from Blythe’s erratic driving.

As this blog explored in a series of posts on “caveman driving,” the reality is that human beings did not evolve to travel at speeds of 30 miles per hour and above. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, maybe we reached 20 miles per hour during a dead sprint chasing after game. But we certainly did not command vehicles weighing several tons; and we did not drive those vehicles at speeds of 30, 40, 50, and 80 miles per hour.

Our society does a pretty good job inculturating drivers – teaching them the rules of the road, getting them to behave safely, etc. – but these rules can break down in an untold number of ways. The consequences can be tragic – physical injuries, emotional trauma, and long-term financial/logistical hassles often result. From a certain perspective, it’s kind of amazing that we can drive the way we drive. We’ve engineered our roads and cars exquisitely well to protect ourselves from our own evolutionarily wired failings.

That said, when the system breaks down, injured victims need help. If you or someone you care about was recently hurt in a North Carolina truck, car, or bicycle accident, you may benefit significantly from talking with an auto accident law firm in North Carolina.

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Triad firefighter hit by car at accident scene

Putting car speeds into context

It happens every day: North Carolina car accidents occur. Reporters, bloggers, lawyers, and others weigh in about what they think happened and what they think “ought to be done” to fix the situation, compensate those hurt, and prevent similar crises from recurring.

Sure, it’s important to have a flourishing, open conversation about car accident safety and prevention. If we did not share information, exchange opinions, test theories against one another, etc., we would be doomed to repeat past mistakes.

On the other hand, there comes a point at which reporting about auto accidents in North Carolina becomes exploitive. What’s the value of the reporting? Is it simply to serve advertisers or to market a message? If so, that can be ethically dubious. On the other hand, if you are trying to provide a valuable message to people – extract lessons from the accident, draw meaning from it, reference it in a compassionate and mindful way – then said reporting can be powerful and helpful. Here are types of value that we can extract from examining North Carolina auto accident news stories:

•    Lessons in “what not to do”: The more that we reflect on bad habits and behaviors – driving DUI, driving recklessly, driving with a poorly maintained car, etc. – the more conscious we and our readers will be of our own driving weaknesses, and the more likely we will be to eliminate them or at least mitigate them.

•    Lessons for the greater good: An accident can highlight problematic systems and processes. For instance, if a reporter notices that one intersection in North Carolina tends to be a magnet for accidents, then by noting this coincidence and alerting the appropriate authorities, we might be able to reengineer the road to make it safer.

•    Lessons for what to do after an accident: In so many cases, victims of accidents panic after the event, which negatively impacts their ability to collect compensation, hold people to justice, and position themselves to feel better, long term, about their case. For instance, a victim might leave the scene of an accident without getting a police report or fail to document potentially helpful witness statements. By drawing attention to what victims could have done better to help themselves, reporting can serve a good purpose.

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The ethics of reporting on accidents

When we discuss North Carolina car accidents, we often oversimplify. For instance, you may learn about a driver who fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed into a school bus. You’d thus be likely leap to blame the driver’s lazyness or negligence for the catastrophe. This analysis might be correct. But we should not overlook simple, subtle, small things that can accumulate to create enhanced risk for accidents.

Consider, for instance, the fact that national holidays like the 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, and Super Bowl Sunday are more “dangerous” than normal days of the week. Why? The hypothesis is that more drivers, on average, drink and party on those days. Thus, there are more drunken drivers on the road. Thus, there are more drunk and driving related accidents.

Sounds simple enough, right?

But this idea hides a complex lesson. For instance, say in a typical town, you would have 20 DUI crashes on any given day; on a national holiday, you’d have 40 DUI crashes. But it’s not like only 20 people “got more drunk” than they normally would. The town’s population, as a whole, drank more than normal. So what you are seeing with these stats is a threshold effect! There probably were A LOT of people who drank a little more than they normally would. But the vast majority didn’t get into accidents because they did not reach the accident threshold – a combination of luck, genetics, etc.

We almost always pay attention to evidence above this threshold – seeing the DUI driver who caused an accident – but we don’t have a way of measuring the “dog that didn’t bite” – the DUI driver who got home safely.

Here is another way to think about this. Most people would never riot at a bar. But imagine if you’re at a bar, and your team wins. Suddenly people start getting rowdy and crazy and throwing chairs. You might “join the fun” and throw a glass or tip over a barstool or do something out of exuberance to be part of the crowd. You would never normally do that. But the social permission changes your behavior.

The moral is: we need to pay attention to small cumulative “things” that provoke us and misbehave on the road – driving under the influence of medication, for instance, or driving while fatigued, or driving long distances on roads that you are not used to driving on, etc. All these below the radar factors can influence your ability to drive safely.

If someone hurt you or someone you love in a car crash, an experienced car accident law firm in North Carolina can help you create a strategy to obtain justice and substantial compensation.

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Small Causes Add Up To Big Effects

The Threshold Effect

Why do car, truck, motorcycle accidents happen in North Carolina – or elsewhere?

This is a pretty simple, straightforward question. So you’d think it would have a pretty simple, straightforward answer. Indeed, if you Google a question like this or spend some time thinking about it or talk to safety experts about it, you’ll get the standard “obvious” answers, such as:

•    The roads are poorly designed or engineered or kept up;
•    Drivers misbehave by driving while under the influence, while distracted, while fatigued, etc;
•    Cars, trucks, motorcycles malfunction due to poor maintenance or spontaneous part failure;
•    Acts of god (thunderstorms, lightening strikes, trees being blown into the road in inopportune times, earthquakes, etc.) are responsible.
•    Etc.

These are the more “obvious” causes of North Carolina car accidents. These findings can be helpful. They can tell us that why certain types of vehicles are safer, help engineers develop better components and equipment, and even teach police officers best practices.

However, we’re certainly overlooking critical factors that could make very subtle, but very critical contributions to North Carolina car crashes. These subtle events are often so far removed – so distant, in time and space – from car crashes themselves that we don’t pay much attention to them. But they are there. And if we could find and address these deep root causes, we could make serious inroads into our automotive safety goals.

For instance, consider the problems posed by the North Carolina obesity epidemic. When you are overweight or obese, you are naturally at higher risk for many other diseases, ranging from type II diabetes to Alzheimer’s to cancer. As a result of the obesity as well as associated conditions, you may feel more fatigued, “mentally cloudy” and weak physically. On top of that, you may need to take certain medications to normalize your blood sugar and treat other side effects. These medications can, in turn, have their own negative effects on driving performance. At the end of the day, we know that drivers who drive fatigued or ill or “mentally cloudy” are at higher risk for causing car crashes. So obesity — and the diseases associated with it — almost certainly causes or contributes to many car crashes, if only in a subtle, very indirect way.

All this is to say that, if we can figure out a way to treat obesity and overweight – we might be able to “knock out” one major source of driver error, negligence, fatigue, bad temperament, etc. Consider this thought experiment. Imagine if every North Carolinian lost 20 pounds of excess fat and had more energy and needed fewer medications. Imagine how those North Carolinians would behave behind the wheel – would they be safer or less safe than their formerly overweight selves?

It’s an interesting thought experiment. To deal with a car crash crisis in your life, connect with a thoughtful, experienced North Carolina auto accident law firm.

More Web Resources:

Finding the Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary Causes

What Would the Cure to Obesity Mean?