You were recently involved in a scary and surprising North Carolina car accident. In the wake of that disaster, however, you’ve had some confusing thoughts about what exactly happened prior to and after the collision. You are pretty sure that the other driver veered into your lane and caused you to weave off to the side of the road. But you are not 100% positive. Or maybe you are certain that the other driver blew through a stop sign and hit the tail of your car – then again, was there a stop sign at that intersection that you missed?

It’s not uncommon for victims of North Carolina car accidents to question their version of events, even if witnesses and others can confirm them. The human memory is notoriously complicated and doesn’t always come up with precise objective renditions of past events. Our emotions color our memories. The stories that we hear – that we tell ourselves after the fact — can also influence memory. And particularly if the accident was somewhat complicated – in which may be you and the other driver were both partially at fault – your mind can extrapolate the worst (or, conversely, entertain overly rosy ideas about how much you were to blame).

Is your mind playing tricks on you? What was the reality of your accident?

To understand complex events, like car accidents, we need hard data, good investigatory techniques, and keen understanding of North Carolina car accident law. One of the first steps is to get good, complete data and evidence as soon as possible after the crash. For instance, if you take a picture of the car accident scene – ideally many pictures – then you will have some kind of objective record to look at. If you interview witnesses and get them to write down their testimony right after the accident, then you have more reliable information. Police reports, medical documents, photographs, even a damaged car itself can all be used to corroborate a version of events or to challenge it.

What you do with that information is also mission critical. If you wait too long to connect with a resource, like Michael DeMayo’s North Carolina car accident law firm, then the information that you collect may lose its relevance, get lost, etc. You may also say or do things that create trouble for your case. For instance, you may make relatively innocuous comments to the other driver’s insurance adjuster – e.g. “I’m feeling a little better now” – that imperil your ability to collect damages months or even years down the line.

To guard against insecurity and poor memory, act with due urgency to collect relevant information and find a good law firm, like DeMayo Law, that you can trust to guide you the rest of the way.

More Web Resources:

The Notorious Value of Remembered Testimony

The tricks our minds can play on us in terms of memory

What if we raised the driving age to 24? How would that impact the number, size, and scope of our North Carolina car accident problem?

A suggestion like this would probably lead you to two immediate thoughts:

•    Of course raising the driving age by 8 years would reduce accidents, probably by a ton!
•    Such a proposal would never fly – and wouldn’t even be a good idea because of productivity loss and the straitjacket-like effect it would have on our state.

First of all, these are understandable thoughts to have.

But second, we might want to consider them more critically.

Yes, if we spiked the driving age significantly, there would be fewer drivers on the road. That in and of itself would probably lead to fewer overall accidents. Also, as drivers get older, they demonstrate more mature judgment and behave in a less impulsive fashion. On the other hand, drivers need to learn driving skills at some point. Teenage drivers don’t exactly have a great reputation for safety and stability and agility in crises. But it takes time to learn any skill. If we bumped up the driving age to 24 (or 21 or whatever), then we would probably have a lot more incompetent 21 or 24-year-old drivers on the road than we do right now. Plus, the temptation for underage drivers to get behind the wheel would be enormous – the amount of cheating would be probably huge and those cheaters would not have the benefit of standard driver ed courses.

So even if there were fewer overall kids driving, the kids who did get behind the wheel would probably be way more dangerous on average than the kids driving now. So you may not see substantial reduction in accidents – or as substantial as you might initially expect.

As far as the second point is concerned, you might be surprised at how easy it is to create social changes – like raising or lowering the voting age, driving age, etc. But there has to be a reason for the shift – and that reason has to be urgent and compelling and simple enough for a large group of people to get behind and support. With respect to the bumping up of the minimum driving age to 21 or 24, there just doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of support in that direction. Safety advocates should therefore spend their time searching for other methods and strategies and tactics to reduce North Carolina auto accidents.

If you’ve been injured or have suffered damages, talk to the team at the Law Offices of Michael A DeMayo today.

More Web Resources:

Should we raise the minimum driving age?

The law of unintended consequences

North Carolina truck accidents are enormous and often catastrophic events. When we see the wreckage on local news reels or YouTube video clips, we are often dumbstruck at the carnage. Trucks are big. They are powerful. They are capable of not only destroying other vehicles on the road, but also of doing serious structural damage to roads, buildings, and structures like bridges and ramps.

Unfortunately, because the end results of accidents are so enormous and dramatic and emotionally gripping, we tend to think that the causes of these wrecks also must likely be big and easy to spot. We might, for instance, think that a truck driver that caused a big wreck on the freeway had been dosing himself with unbelievable amounts of methamphetamine. Maybe he was trying to drive across the country in 100 hours flat, without ever stopping to rest or sleep, for instance. And sometimes the cause IS dramatic — a brake snaps and fails during a critical freeway moment, for instance. But often, the root-cause of accidents is far more subtle:

•    A dirty windshield, for instance, can distract a driver, preventing him from seeing a truck approaching along his side;
•    A truck driver fails to notice a freeway sign that indicates that his particular type of vehicle should not be on the road, given the weather conditions or the size of his load;
•    The drivers of both vehicles get distracted by a sports game on the radio and thus fail to react with exquisite enough precision to avoid collision.

So you can have these subtle causes.

Here is something else that’s interesting. Many accidents have MULTIPLE causes – or contributing factors – some of which may be extremely subtle and difficult to detect, even with the most cutting-edge forensics. A truck driver who is borderline diabetic and who has blood sugar issues might, for instance, suffer a lapse of judgment – or a degradation in his driving capabilities. But unless you do blood work on that driver and manage to connect his pre-diabetes with the accident, this contributing factor would be very difficult to detect.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do the investigative and legal legwork by yourself. You can connect with an experienced North Carolina truck accident law firm, like DeMayo Law, to help understand your rights and potential avenues of recourse.

More Web Resources:

Subtle Factors which can Influence Your Driving

How much thought have you given to avoiding North Carolina car accidents?

If you or someone you love was recently involved in an auto accident, you are probably spending quite a bit of time ruminating over what happened and what went wrong.

Here’s a counterintuitive thought for you: whether there has been an accident in your life recently or not, you are probably not thinking about the future enough!

Here’s why. The reality is that you can’t change the past – you can only impact the present and the potential future.

As this blog has discussed on many occasions, North Carolina auto accident prevention should be on the top of everyone’s list – agencies, insurance companies, businesses, and individual drivers – especially drivers who have recently been hurt or suffered damage.

We all know the standard safety messages: wear your safety belt, don’t drive DUI, don’t yap on your cell phone while behind the wheel, etc. But even those of us who do pay attention to these basic safety guidelines struggle with identifying potentially “out of the box” ideas for accident reduction/prevention.

There are some good clues out there, however, if you bother to look. For instance, accidents don’t happen at random times. There are certain times when it’s far more dangerous to drive – and certain times when it’s relatively safer to get behind the wheel. Some of the most dangerous times to drive include:

•    Friday and Saturday nights
•    National holidays (such as the Super Bowl, 4th of July, Labor Day weekend, Memorial Day weekend, New Year’s Eve, Halloween, etc.)
•    Different roads and highways may have different “danger times” – if you drive on a particular road or highway frequently (i.e. every day), you might want to talk to local law enforcement officers about when that particular road is the most dangerous – and where along that road is the most dangerous.

In other words, there is a tremendous amount of information out there – about specific roads that can be dangerous or about times at which certain roads became dangerous. Pay attention to those statistics and then using them to guide your driving decisions.

Putting Theory into Practice

Say you do a little homework and learn that, on your road to work, you pass one curve where there have been seven accidents in the past five years. It’s a dangerous curve – due to sight line problems, road engineering, or whatever. Once you know this information, you can change your behavior accordingly. For instance, you might find a way to bypass that particular intersection. Or you might just make a note to yourself to pay extra attention whenever you come to that curve – give your driving your full attention and then some when you reach that point.

Alternatively, maybe you can make a conscious decision to avoid driving on Friday and Saturday nights, when the young drunk crowd is out on the roads. Subtle choices like these won’t necessarily save your life. But they could reduce your likelihood of getting involved in a crash, especially over the long-term.

If you need help getting compensation or justice with respect to a car crash, connect immediately with a North Carolina auto accident law firm.

More Web Resources:

The Most Dangerous Times to Drive

Are Some Roads More Dangerous Than Others?

What can we do to make North Carolina car crashes “go away,” so that our roads will be essentially 100% safe?

How can we make drivers treat each other humanely, even under difficult conditions, inclement weather, etc?

Before you get lost in pondering these questions, stop. The questions are fundamentally absurd. The idea that we could ever hope to achieve a 100% safety rate in any endeavor in our life is comically absurd. Life is inherently a risky affair. Indeed, stop and contemplate the odds that you were even lucky enough to be born – they were astronomically stacked against you. All along the path of life, we constantly face risks. Even just sitting and lying on your bed too long can lead to bedsores, which can lead to sepsis (infection) and death. What’s more, out attempts to cocoon ourselves against the specter of risk can backfire in unexpected ways. The over-use of antibiotics, for instance, can prevent you from building up an effective immune system and thus, ironically, render you more predisposed to catching colds.

Many researchers now believe that our fear of dietary saturated fat (the idea that eating fat leads to heart disease) led us down the path of consuming way too many unhealthy simple carbohydrates and sugars… thus accidentally making us sicker and fatter.

The problem when we talk about issues like auto safety or diets or sun exposure or any other factor in life where you can “overcompensate” in both directions (getting “too much” of something or getting “too little” of it) is that you can easily become ideological. If you say that, for instance, no car accident prevention scheme will be 100% effective, some people might take that conclusion too far. They’ll then say “okay, life is risky. So why bother trying to make cars safer in the first place, then?”

That’s missing the point!

The point is that questions like “how can we make North Carolina cars and roads safer?” are fundamentally complex. They are not easily distilled down to a sound bite or a one word answer.

And until we develop the language — and a culture of thinking — that respects this kind of complexity, we are always going to be oversimplifying our problems and oversimplifying the solutions to those problems to the detriment of the intention of our quests.

More Web Resources:

Are we getting too much sunlight…or too little?

Are we eating too much fat…or too little?

On Saturday March 31st, the Charlotte Motor Speedway was rocked by a fatal North Carolina motorcycle accident that took the lives of two motorcyclists and send a third biker to the hospital in critical condition.

According to reports, the Vietnam Veterans’ Homecoming Celebration had been a raucous event – over 62,000 people showed up to celebrate the service of American Armed Forces who fought in the Vietnam War. The festival featured an exhibition of the Vietnam Memorial itself, a performance by the Charlie Daniels Band, and thousands of motorcyclists riding around the track.

A report from the Yahoo! Sports Bureau painted a pretty scary picture of this motorcycle circus: “Several witnesses interviewed by area newspapers indicate there was plenty of unsafe driving going on…many of the estimated 2,000 riders were not wearing helmets. Some riders were attempting to scale the speedway’s high-banked turns, which aren’t meant for slower-speed driving. Finally, there were reports that traffic was going both ways on the speedway, which, of course, has no lane markers to guide riders.”

If this report is even close to correct, it’s easy to understand why a fatal North Carolina motorcycle accident took place there. It all comes down to the law of averages. If you get enough dangerous drivers together doing dangerous things for a long enough period of time, horrors are going to unfold.

Unfortunately, many riders who engage in unsafe practices — like riding without a helmet or driving too fast or attempting tricks on their bikes — will look at articles like this and come to a conclusion like “that will never happen to me.” And chances are, on any given day, they will be right. Statistics are very, very difficult for us to understand on a visceral, emotional level.

If doing something like riding your motorcycle without a helmet increases your chances of a fatal collision by 15% over five years (not accurate figures), you might be alarmed. But say you broke that stat down to a day-to-day number. You’d likely only be very fractionally more likely to get hurt on any given day as a result of your “reckless driving.” Only when we see behavior in aggregate – over long periods of time or, in this case, seeing thousands of drivers all behaving irrationally in tandem – can you truly appreciate the potential dangers of behaving carelessly.

This analysis, by the way, is not intended in any way to diminish this tragedy or to make any comments about the accident itself. Rather, we want to highlight the disconnect. That is, when would-be reckless drivers see reports like this, they ignore the potential ramifications, and we don’t want you to ignore the ramifications because they could be important.

For help with a specific case, connect with an experienced North Carolina car and motorcycle crash law firm.

More Web Resources:

Charlotte Motor Speedway Motorcycle Tragedy

Vietnam Veteran Festival

On Saturday March 31st, a tragic North Carolina car crash on Interstate 77 took the life of 16-year-old Thomas Luciano, a student at South Mecklenburg High School. According to local reports from WCNC, Luciano was thrown out of an SUV during the crash – he had not been wearing a safety belt. The other passengers and the driver survived, although another passenger, Roland Calhoun, had to undergo surgery for an injury he sustained in the crash. Luciano’s friends painted a big rock outside their high school with messages remembering and celebrating him.

Tragedies like this car crash occur far too often in North Carolina and elsewhere. What can we learn from situations like this? Since the police investigation of the accident has not yet concluded, we can’t really say much about the cause of the crash. If it’s true that Luciano was not been wearing his safety belt, most accident investigators would probably say that omission was significant. But accidents are peculiar and eccentric events. Yes, the statistics definitely show that people who wear safety belts are more likely to survive car crashes and avoid injuries.

But when we jump too quickly to conclusions, we can shortchange ourselves and any friends or family members hurt in a crash. For instance, maybe you, too, recently got hurt in a North Carolina car crash in which you had not be wearing a seatbelt or in which “you drove too fast.” Or something. In other words, you believe that you were at fault in some fashion. You could just accept this diagnosis and try to move on with your life. But a detailed analysis may show that some other factor was also involved – perhaps, crucially so. For instance, maybe your car’s brakes malfunctioned. Maybe the road itself had a design flaw that caused your car to spin out on a curve.

The takeaway is that you may find it extremely useful to get an objective, clearheaded, experienced perspective on what happened. A North Carolina car crash law firm, for instance, can help you protect your rights and preserve potential opportunities to collect compensation from a reckless driver, careless mechanic, or other party.

More Web Resources:

“Classmates Mourn Teen Killed in Crash” WCNC.com Charlotte.

South Mecklenburg High School

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.

More Web Resources:

The Gist of John Sarno’s TMS Theory

The Norwegian Lithuanian Whiplash Study

The North Carolina car accident prevention experts may be a little too boxed in and wanting for creativity. We typically think about auto safety prevention only in terms of the conventional wisdom about it – that people need to wear seatbelts more often, that drivers need to drive slower, that drivers need to stop text messaging and driving DUI, that roads need to be better built, that car parts need to be more durable and regularly inspected, etc.

There is nothing wrong with these conventional ideas about auto safety – provided that we subject them to rigorous scientific tests and make rational actions based on the data that we collect. But it’s very easy in the world of science and auto accident prevention to make logical errors that can redound to lead to more injuries/deaths… as well as lot of wasted time and opportunity. For instance, as intrepid researcher Tom Vanderbilt argued in his book, Traffic, the wide adoption of air bags should have led to a significant across the board decrease in injuries. But it didn’t. Vanderbilt theorizes that drivers who bought safer cars took extra liberties – drove a little bit faster, followed other cars a little more closely – because they felt safer. This slightly more reckless driving offset the safety related improvements.

The moral is: We need to be very, very careful when it comes to how we think about North Carolina car accident prevention. Along those lines, it certainly wouldn’t hurt us to theorize about “out of the box” solutions for car accident safety, such as:

•    Why not mandate that automobile drivers and passengers alike wear helmets for extra protection against head injury?
•    Why not publicly humiliate randomly selected “jerk drivers” to dissuade other would-be “jerks” out there from doings things like weaving across four lanes of traffic in one turn without even using a turn signal?
•    Why not conduct rigorous experiments to test which highway speed limits lead to the least fatalities and most driver satisfaction?
•    Why not experiment with an education campaign to encourage drivers to eliminate not just some distractions (e.g. cell phone conversations) but all distractions in the vehicle — such as conversations, listening to the radio, etc – to see whether a completely “distraction free” environment would enhance safety and driver focus?

These are obviously just speculative strategies. But it is important to think outside of the normal conventional ways of thinking about auto safety, if we want to really make major progress in reducing the terrifying numbers, such as the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration statistic that 40,000 Americans die every year in auto crashes.
For help dealing with a specific accident, connect with North Carolina car crash law firm today.

More Web Resources:

Summary of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic

Out of the Box Safety Ideas

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.

More Web Resources:

The ethics of reporting on accidents