Saturday, March 16, 2019

Appropriate Technology: Seat Belts

Tonight I'm going to briefly wax poetic about the one behavior you can adopt to most reduce your chances of dying horribly.

Got your attention?  Good.

It's simple.  It's easy.  It's also the law.

Wear your seatbelt.

Even if you're only going a short distance.  Even if you're just moving your car.  Even if you're not going out on the public road.

Wear your seatbelt.  Every time.

Make it a habit.

It costs you nothing, only a few seconds.

It could save you everything.

When you hit the steering wheel with your chest, and you are restrained by a seatbelt, and you get badly hurt, it is usually abdominal injuries.  These can be treated promptly and surgically.

Without a seatbelt, at a much lower speed, you hit your head on the inside of the windshield and discover the life altering joys of traumatic brain injury.  Or you can hit the steering wheel with your unrestrained chest and take your pick: flail chest and drown in your own blood, or aortic separation and just plain bleed out internally in less than a minute.

Now that you know the choices, wear your seatbelt.

There are endless reasons for not wearing your seatbelt.  They are all bogus.  I won't list them here, except one.  

There is a myth that you might be trapped in your vehicle by your seatbelt.  If it worries you, get a very sharp folding knife or EMS shears, keep the tool safely in your center console or secured by a lanyard to your seat, get a seat belt out of a junked car and practice cutting one.  Seat belt cutters sold to consumers are mostly junk.

If you are instead ejected from a vehicle, the chances of being zipped into a body bag instead of loaded into an ambulance go up only four hundred percent or so.

It's simple.  But on the statistics, it's the #1 think you can do to improve your odds of dying of something other than a vehicle collision.

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