I went along with a client to an IME last week. That's an independent medical examination for those of you who haven't had the pleasure...Your insurance company has a right to request these evaluations to determine if the treatment you are receiving is appropriate (the actual terminology is "reasonable, necessary, and accident related"; this gives them lots of room to differ with your own doctor's opinion). This doc was pretty good, seemed to be a patient advocate.

But what was interesting to me was that the insurance company sent him pictures of the car! And he said, "well, it doesn't look like there was much damage to your car" as if this has any bearing on the person inside the car. Lawyers refer to these sorts of accidents as "low impact" even though there really isn't any way of telling if the person inside was shaken up.

A few years ago, there was a segment on 60 minutes that must have been sponsored by the insurance industry that showed an "experiment" where people were sitting in a car, holding a cup of coffee, then purposely hit by another car. Surprise! Not only were they not injured but they didn't even spill the coffee! So, obviously, it's not possible to be injured in low impact accidents.

But the reality is that people do get injured in low impact accidents. Fairly often. The point is that there are a lot of variables. How was the person sitting? How long is the persons neck? Was she bracing (like the people in the "experiment") or taken by surprise? Did the impact cause her to hit the headrest sharply? Even accident reconstruction engineers have a hard time coming up with these facts.

Do you remember the old Volvo ads: they showed a crumpled front end to prove how safe the cars are. The car absorbed the forces! Now, I'm not a physicist, but my friend, Joe, who is, commented once: "the forces have to go somewhere." And if the car doesn't absorb some of them, doesn't it make sense that they might radiate through a body sitting in the car (soft tissue, brain, jaw -- uh oh)? Kind of like an earthquake.

Once I "bumped" a car that had stopped sharply in front of me. No damage to either vehicle. But when I got back in the car, I saw that a heavy ceramic coffee mug in the cup holder had shattered. Not that I needed convincing. But sometimes I use it as an example to illustrate the point.