Now, watching each spinal segment in a live human being during a whiplash-type collision is not an easy task. What these scientists did was to subject a volunteer to a simulated rear end collision, while videotaping the spinal motion with an X-ray video camera at very high speeds (about 500 frames per second). Whiplash injuries occur in about a tenth of a second, so that the entire occupant motion would take up just three frames with a regular video camera with a rate of 30 frames per second.
These researchers found that the nice, smooth motions that they saw when looking at the overall motion during whiplash were much more complex when they examined the motions of individual segments.
The new whiplash motion looks like this.
Phase I: Upright spine before collision. Phase II: Immediately after the impact, the car seat pushes the torso forward while the head remains stationary. At the same time, the torso "ramps" up the seat, compressing the cervical spine. Phase III: The spine forms an S-shaped curve at about 75 milliseconds into the collisionbefore the musculature of the neck has a chance to react. This S-shaped curve, shown in Figure 3, results in sharp bending in just a few spinal segments. Phase IV: After the sharp bending occurs, the spine fully extends. Historically, this is the point where most scientists thought injury occurred. (See Soft-Tissue Review, Volume 3, Number 2.) The latest study on this issue shows that the joint capsule undergoes excessive stress in just a few segments of the spineso much stress that the joint capsules can be torn or the cartilage in the joint itself can be "pinched," resulting in tissue damageand pain.
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