dr-exmedic.com

In NHTSA lingo, a “greenhouse” is all the glass of a given auto.  In yet another ICEM study for which I have only the abstract, a group of researchers looked at whether broken glass at the scene of a car wreck could predict which occupants might have C-spine injuries.  They figured, sensibly, that a crash gentle enough to not break any glass wasn’t going to break any spines.

After using one of the NHTSA’s giant databases of car crashes, the researchers found more than 23,000 relevant cases.  Finding a car with an intact greenhouse gave you only a 0.2% chance that one of the occupants had suffered a C-spine injury.  The performance of this test is arguably better than that of the more famous NEXUS C-spine rule, and comparable to the Canadian rule.

The biggest problem with their data set was that they used only front seat passengers, aged 16-60, wearing seat belts, in cars without airbag deployment.  Despite these limitations, they came up with a test that predicted safe C-spines with about 99.8% certainty–not bad at all.  If we can just verify this rule, then add it to the list of who doesn’t need to be slapped on a backboard, we’ll be all set to quit boarding as many people.