TO YOU and me, it's a car crash. But to the very serious people who've gathered for an international conference in Dublin this week, it's a biomechanical impact. And that's only for starters.
The event - the 1996 International IRCOBI (International Research Council on Biomechanics of Impact) conference - has a programme to traumatise a lexicographer.
After a two day educational course which began yesterday at the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, the real business gets under way tomorrow with a session on the "viscoelastic response of the human brain to saggital/ lateral rotational acceleration by finite element analysis".
A discussion on the "material properties of the developing porcine brain" lightens the tone a little, before the serious business continues with a talk on "human cervical spine loads during traumatomechanical investigations", followed by: "a new neck injury criterion candidate based on injury findings in the cervical spine ganglia after experimental sagittal whiplash".
The really difficult stuff is left to Friday morning, when the conference draws to a close with a paper on "sled tests with toepan intrusion using post mortem human surrogates and the hybrid III dummy".
Sounds like something from the RTE Halloween schedule.
There are a few talks ill English, however. "Jockey's head injuries and skull cap performance" sounds reassuringly accessible, as does "crash tests using passenger cars fitted with airbags and a simulated out of position passenger.
The event kicked off yesterday in suitably black humour, with speakers cracking pathologist jokes (poor autopsy reports are the bane of IRCOBI's life, it seems) and a cheerful description of how an important injury severity scale was compiled by systematically dropping cadaverous heads down a lift shaft in Detroit.
Another speaker introduced a slide of a cutaway brain stem with the quip: "This is an orthopaedic colleague of mine. He wasn't joking, apparently.
Whether the conference sheds any light on that staple of the professional compensation claim - whiplash - remains to be seen.
But Dr Elaine Petrucelli from Chicago reminded the first day audience of a definition offered by the doctor generally credited with coining the term.
Bitterly resenting his infamy, Dr John Crowe described whiplash as "a sprain of the cervical spine which cannot be fully relieved until all litigation has been completed".
Come to think of it, another talk "validation of a finite element model of the human neck" - might help explain the phenomenon.
