Source: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001463
Citation: Redelmeier DA, McLellan BA (2013) Modern Medicine Is Neglecting Road Traffic Crashes. PLoS Med 10(6): e1001463. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001463
Received: March 12, 2013; Accepted: April 24, 2013; Published: June 11, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Redelmeier, McLellan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This project was supported by a Canada Research Chair in Medical Decision Sciences and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the Ontario Ministry of Health. The funders had no role in the decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: DAR is a member of the Editorial Board of PLOS Medicine. BAM has declared that no competing interests exist.
Provenance: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Summary Points
- Despite a high burden of disease, motor vehicle trauma has not generated proportionate attention in clinical medicine, public health agencies, or the wider community.
- The relative neglect arises in part from a denial of aggregate statistics, the banality of everyday crashes, and the lack of a labelled lobby group.
- Further clinical factors include biased beliefs among surviving patients, segregation of clinical services, inescapable research limitations, and idiosyncratic scientific traditions.
- Additional policy barriers arise from conflicting economic priorities, fundamental insuperability, and inescapable cultural diversity.
- Significant progress toward mitigating motor vehicle trauma will likely continue by modest positive incremental gains in road safety.