Does a car crash hurt?

I regularly hear anecdotal stories of people being in these horrific car accidents and walking away without any injuries. Conversely, someone being in what appears to be a minor car accident and having a very bad injury. 

Obviously, if you drive by a car accident and see a car upside down and burnt to a crisp in a ditch, you can’t help but wonder what happened to the people inside. There is a solid assumption that whoever is inside is probably injured as well because of the physical mechanics of that accident. However, lots of times, people walk away from those horrible accidents with no injuries. 

Just like the old saying goes, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” you can’t always judge the impact of an accident on what you see at the scene. Some people can walk away from a very bad accident without an injury, and others walk away from what appears to be a minor accident with catastrophic injuries. So much of it has to do with the person’s preexisting conditions, how physically they were sitting in the car, and what happened thereafter. 

Lots of people that are in a car accident walk away from the actual scene feeling great. The reality is that they are looking at themselves, and there are no broken bones, and there is no blood on the ground. They are so relieved to have been in that massive accident, and yet they don’t seem to have any physical injuries at the moment. A lot of times, those physical injuries are masked by the chemicals in your body and the endorphins rushing through your body from the event you just went through. So you may not feel hurt that day, but you wake up in the morning particularly sore, and that soreness may go on for days or weeks, and unfortunately, that soreness may turn into an injury that may be long-lasting.