Peoria Illinois Personal Injury Law Blog

When you ride a bike, it's all-too-easy to end up in a wreck with a motor vehicle. Cars, sports utility vehicles, trucks and commercial vehicles all tend to hog the road and act as if bicyclists don't have the right to be there.

Knowledge is the key to avoiding a serious injury.

Your instincts may tell you to swerve out of your lane to avoid an accident. For instance, imagine that you're driving down the highway in Illinois when another car blows out a tire ahead of you. Worried that you're going to rear-end the now-disabled car as it slows down rapidly, you swerve to the left to avoid the crash.

But what happens when you do that? You increase the odds of a head-on collision. This is why police officers say you should never take this type of evasive action.

No doubt you have heard someone make a stereotypical comment about another driver. One of the most common examples is the way that people sometimes make jokes about women being worse drivers than men. Another example is when people accuse Asian drivers of being more dangerous than drivers of other ethnic backgrounds.

What is amazing about these stereotypes is not just that they're inaccurate, but that they're so wrong that they often get things entirely backward. The groups that are stereotyped as being poor drivers break fewer traffic laws, make fewer mistakes and get into fewer accidents.

When an auto accident or other catastrophic event causes the loss of a limb to amputation, physical and psychological recovery take a long time. The patient must deal with not only the initial trauma, but also with the necessity of adapting to his or her “new normal” that usually includes learning how to perform tasks and functions with a prosthesis. In addition, US News reports that as many as 95% of amputees suffer from phantom limb pain. This phenomenon gets its name from the fact that the pain seems to come from the limb that the patient no longer has.

Per the Mayo Clinic, physicians originally believed that PLP was psychological, although quite real. Now, however, they believe that PLP results from mix-ups in the signals passing between the brain and spinal cord.