Ideas for legislative change come from many sources. If laws are a matter of safety, perhaps it is no surprise that emergency room doctors would form some opinions about how certain injuries and illnesses could be prevented.
Doctors in the state are weighing in on the matter of motorcycle safety. Based on what they see in the emergency rooms, the medical professionals reportedly believe that Pennsylvania needs stricter motorcycle helmet laws.
Motorcycle accidents commonly lead to various types of injuries: serious cuts and scrapes, burns, bone fractures, spinal cord injuries, head injuries and more. Of these kinds of crash injuries, head injuries can commonly be what cause motorcycle accidents to be fatal. If a head injury isn’t fatal, it can still most certainly be severe and forever change a rider’s quality of life.
Pennsylvania doctors see mandatory helmet laws as a logical way to reduce the rate of motorcyclists who get killed and critically injured on the roads. A stricter law would potentially require all riders from wearing a helmet, no matter their age and motorcycling experience levels.
A doctor’s job is to provide patient care and promote good health within his or her community. Of course, all people’s insight regarding traffic safety laws is valuable but not necessarily important to legal situations like personal injury cases.
With or without a helmet law change in the state, Pennsylvania motorcycle accident victims should not feel or be treated like the default wrongdoers following a crash. Whether he was wearing a helmet or not, if an injured rider identifies another driver’s negligence as cause of his suffering, he should work with a motorcycle accident lawyer in his area.
Source: Patriot-News, “Emergency room doctors have some controversial advice for Pennsylvania: Editorial,” Jan. 17, 2014