seat belts?

[sportygirl]

I always wear my seat belt. The reason i wrote this was because 3 weeks ago i lost a friend in a car crash he was not wearing a seat belt. And then in high school some of my freinds were coming home from a foot ball game and all but one had a seat belt on and he was safer with out it because his side was completely demolished. But then it makes me think if your're all saying that it is rare that people are safe with out on on how rare is it?

[zippyRN]

Ok i have a question? On seat belts, in any one's experince have you seen better out come of survival with a seat belt on or off? For example, in a roll over accident the pt was not wearing his seat belt and he didn't make it. But in another accident the pt was not wearing a seat belt and that saved her because in the crash she was thrown in the back seat and the dash folded down around the front seat had she been in the seat she would have been crushed from the waist down.

the simplest answer to this is a rollover RTC i saw patients from about 5or 6 years ago - car was 5 up car hasd 5 seatbelts, one passengerwasn;t wearing theirs ....

4 people walked out of the hospital either that night or the next morning, bruise battered and sore but with no significant injuries, thefifth didn't even make the ED - traumatic arrest on scene

people will come up with 1 in one million stories of howa seat belt would have killed someone, the epidemioligcal data says otherwise

'manual' lap and diagonal seatbelts work - especially combined with european spec airbags

Edited March 13, 2009 by zippyRN

[Retread]

Boy; I wish I'd keep the numbers. Sporty you know, I have been in EMS since 1971 in one capacity or another. I have seen seat belt development from old simple lap belts. The vast majority of seat belt wearers have fared much better than their non-wearing counterparts but alas I have no numbers to back it up.

All I can offer is my opinion based on my observations and recollections. Like they say, seatbelts save lives!! Lead by example, wear yours too. Heck, you already paid for them when you bought the car.

[FL_Medic]

Link to article

Do Seat Belts Really Protect Your Internal Organs?

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By Martin - Posted on 27 December 2008, 22:34 (GMT)

I've seen this question touted around the internet a few times recently, in response to an advert for a car safety campaign that's currently being shown in the UK. The advert suggests that wearing a seat belt protects your internal organs from impact, by depicting an unrestrained man who dies due to his organs being turned into something you'd use in gravy after smashing up against his rib cage. What people have been asking is, how on Earth does a seatbelt restrain your internal organs? Surely by restraining your rib cage in place it just makes the impact even worse?

Well the answer is that yes, seat belts do cushion your insides. It's a bit counterintuitive, but here's my best explanaation for you.

Car crashes aren't instantaneous. Your car collides with an object, but the passenger compartment continues to move for fractions of a second as the front of the car crumples and whatever you've just hit (assuming it's something mobile like another car) shifts out of your path. The numbers I'm going to use now are totally unrealistic, but they illustrate the example clearly.

Let's imagine that you're in your car doing 40mph when you hit another vehicle, and let's pretend that it takes the passenger compartment of your car 0.5s to come to a stop. The car therefore decelerates at 80mph per second.

Now imagine you're in that car and unrestrained. Think this through with me in slow motion. The collision occurs, and the car begins to decelerate as the body crumples and distorts, but unrestrained your body keeps its momentum, and you continue to move forward for 0.25s before hitting the dashboard. At this point, your body is still doing 40mph, but the dashboard has already slowed down to 20mph and will reach 0mph in the next tenth of a second. Your body comes to a halt in 0.25s. That's a deceleration rate of 160mph per sec, which is enough that the coroner will have to retrieve your eye-balls from the next county.

Now let's try this with the seat belt on. The same impact occurs, but the seatbelt locks 0.1s into the accident. At that point, the car is still doing 32mph, you lose 8mph of speed in an instant, and 40mph of speed over 0.4s, a deceleration rate of 100mph per sec. Still gut-wrenching, but nowhere near as bad as it was when you were unrestrained. Again, I've just plucked these numbers from the air, but you get the general idea.

The above may all be a bit confusing still, so here's the simplest explanation. If you're in a car and you hit something, the car decelerates at a certain rate. If you're unrestrained, then you will carry on moving, and when you finally hit something you'll slow down even faster than the car did. Ideally, you'd be trussed to your seat like a turkey, which is exactly what we do with, for example, Formula 1 drivers, although in day-to-day life it's a bit less practical.

In addition to to above effect, the other significant factor is that seat-belts are not as inflexible as they might seem. Sure, if you grab one with your hands and try to stretch it, you probably won't get very far. But in an accident, they're surprisingly elastic, able to stretch up to 150% of their original length as they hold you in place. Again, this spreads the force of impact over a period of time, compared with being stopped by your face shunting into the windscreen.

So I hope that this little Physics lesson helps someone. Seat belts save an absolutely enormous amount of lives, and as much as I'd like to see the queue at the muffin shop next to Windsor and Eton Central be a bit smaller in the mornings, I feel compelled to finish this blog post with the tediously predictable sentiment "drive safely".

So, er, drive safely.

[Just Plain Ruff]

One day in Band Camp-

but seat belts have saved countless more lives than not wearing them. End of story.

[Lone Star]

Having been in more than one accident, both as a 'restrained driver' and an 'unrestrained driver', I can tell you from personal experience, that my injuries as the 'unrestrained driver' were far worse than any injuries I may have had while being properly seatbelted into my seat!

Do seatbelts save lives? Every statistical report I've ever read proves that they do. Personal experience backs up this data.

While I don't reccommend testing this data like I did, I DO advocate the use of seatbelts. Don't follow in my 'footsteps' and have to learn this lesson the hard way!

[Richard B the EMT]

Those UK seat belt commercials are always interesting. There is one I have seen shows the one guy in the back seat, who, on vehicle impact, is thrown into all 3 other persons in the vehicle, killing all.

There is always going to be one in a million who can claim NOT wearing the seat belt saved their life in a collision (I know one guy who has been ejected through the wind shield...TWICE), but the chances are so high against survival, I think I'm going to continue using the belts.

Due to my size, I went to a Ford car parts dealer for a seat belt extender to use on my ambulance. The dealer, not asking that I needed the extender for my work, gave it to me for no cost!

Also, I have seen video footage from my friends at the NYPD's Police Academy Driving Range (their EVOC), showing how, when driving through the high speed traffic cone serpentine course, unseat belted cadets are bouncing all over the seats. If it were the driver, they had higher instances of losing control of the car.

Edited March 14, 2009 by Richard B the EMT

[FL_Medic]

Those UK seat belt commercials are always interesting. There is one I have seen shows the one guy in the back seat, who, on vehicle impact, is thrown into all 3 other persons in the vehicle, killing all.

There is always going to be one in a million who can claim NOT wearing the seat belt saved their life in a collision (I know one guy who has been ejected through the wind shield...TWICE), but the chances are so high against survival, I think I'm going to continue using the belts.

Due to my size, I went to a Ford car parts dealer for a seat belt extender to use on my ambulance. The dealer, not asking that I needed the extender for my work, gave it to me for no cost!

Also, I have seen video footage from my friends at the NYPD's Police Academy Driving Range (their EVOC), showing how, when driving through the high speed traffic cone serpentine course, unseat belted cadets are bouncing all over the seats. If it were the driver, they had higher instances of losing control of the car.

I've been looking for that commercial you're talking about. I saw it at a conference.

[crotchitymedic1986]

I think i took a seatbelt off of a dead patient maybe twice in over 20 years. I have seen a few patients who survived without wearing one, like you suggested, that probable would have been killed if wearing one, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Google "ambulance crash test" or Nadine Levick's ambulance crash study. If you find her video'd ambulance crash tests you will have no questions about whether you should or should not wear a belt on the ambulance. Did you know that ambulances are not required to be crash-tested or crash-worthy in the states ?

[itku2er]

I think i took a seatbelt off of a dead patient maybe twice in over 20 years. I have seen a few patients who survived without wearing one, like you suggested, that probable would have been killed if wearing one, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Google "ambulance crash test" or Nadine Levick's ambulance crash study. If you find her video'd ambulance crash tests you will have no questions about whether you should or should not wear a belt on the ambulance. Did you know that ambulances are not required to be crash-tested or crash-worthy in the states ?

no I had no clue about that one. I just assumed that all emergency vechicles had to be crash tested.

Here is one of many videos I found googling maybe others can add as we go just to show what could happen.

OUCH