Numerous scientific and medical studies prove that the extent of damage to your vehicle is not a predictor of the extent of damage to your neck caused by a whiplash injury. In short, there’s no connection: you can find severe whiplash in the rider of a vehicle that suffered only a paint scratch, and you find a person with no whiplash damage who’s car has been totaled.
- Specifically, no correlation is found between vehicle damage and:
- The degree of whiplash injury
- The duration of treatment required for whiplash injury
- The severity of the symptoms of whiplash injury
- The probability of chronic pain caused by whiplash injury
- Or the probability of whiplash-related arthritis in the joints of the neck developing later.
Some vehicles are designed to collapse during an accident; others are made to resist collapse. All necks are designed with more or less the same standards of movement – so there’s a solid, engineering-based reason why no amount of correlation is found between vehicle damage and whiplash damage.