Spinal research and automobile crashes

For more than 20 years, Dr. Arthur C. Croft, director of the Spine Research Institute of San Diego, has been engaged in spinal research investigating the effects of automobile collisions-particularly the low speed variety which results in approximately 3 million whiplash injuries each year. Contrary to the notion that many people hold that whiplash is a fictitious condition inspiring false claims of injury, the facts are that nearly half of all persons injured in this way develop some form of long-term pain or dysfunction. Spinal research has been increasing in recent years, looking for ways to make cars safer in these low speed crashes and Dr. Croft has been a leading pioneer in this work. He has been one of the few who conducts actual human subject crash tests and, to date, has compiled the result of over 80 full scale crash tests, more than any other research center in the U.S. Dr. Croft also teaches seminars on the subject of whiplash injury.

In low speed crashes where whiplash or brain injuries are claimed, insurers or other parties to the resulting lawsuits often call upon accident reconstructionists to investigate these crashes in an attempt to better understand the forces involved. In the special case of low speed crashes, particularly when little or no property damage has resulted, this is a very challenging undertaking, requiring a great deal of guesswork. Dr. Arthur C. Croft, director of the Spine Research Institute of San Diego, has been trained as an accident reconstructionist and has been an active crash test and clinical researcher for the past two decades. He's written extensively on this subject and has investigated many of the commonly used methods of accident reconstruction demonstrating some of the limitations of the current methods of accident reconstruction. Because of the very wide vulnerability of human occupants to the various forces of low velocity collisions, accident reconstruction has not been shown to be a reliable estimate of injury risk.