Should a person wear a seatbelt while driving an automobile? This has been as debate, since the first seatbelt, was introduced in a car. Many say yes, and others say no. We have always heard, seatbelts save lives, but do they really? The author of this paper says they don=t. Studies show, that wearing a seatbelt in a crash, can cause fatality more often than not. Everybody is so worried about being safe that they fail to see, how much damage seatbelts can do.
As the author stated before, people fail to see just how much damage wearing a seatbelt can do. There is a syndrome called Aseatbelt syndrome.@ This is when the seat belt causes injury to the soft tissue. If there is enough force, pushing the rider into the seatbelt, it can bite into the soft tissue, severing breasts, damaging the bowels, and even cause spontaneous abortions.
Seatbelt
A three point seat belt in a Lincoln Town Car.
English: old seat belt in a Cessna C206In some cases the injury was even more severe, a 10-year-old boy is now a quadriplegic because the force at which he was pushed into the seatbelt, caused the seatbelt to snap his spine like a twig. Children are particularly at risk. In a 1992 study of only 10 cases four distinct patterns of injury occurred. Paraplegia, which was thought to be uncommon, occurred in three of the ten cases. Four children had intra-abdominal injuries requiring laparotomy, and all had contusion of the abdominal wall, Athe seatbelt sign.@
The cause of Athe seatbelt sign@ is the force at which, the rider is stopped by the seatbelt. For a 160lb person and with a stopping distance of one foot, the force applied is about 4800 lbs. or 2.4 tons, and the deceleration is about thirty g=s. The forces applied to a 160 lb. person are 2.4 tons, imagine what a...