This just in from the Sun Sentinel Newspaper here in Florida. This is the accident where the man in a motor boat at night crashed into the damn over a canal in Broward County, Florida. His blood alcohol level was three times over the legal limit. He was alone in the boat.

Hollywood man fatally injured in boat crash was legally drunk
October 4, 2007

A Hollywood man who was critically injured when he crashed his boat in a canal on Sunday has died, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said.

Mark Edward Babinec, 37, had been navigating the Dania Cut-Off Canal Sunday night when he hit his head on a set of pipes that hang low over the canal and then crashed into the embankment at State Road 7 and Orange Drive, officials said.

Babinec’s blood alcohol level at the time of the crash was .242, about three times the legal limit, according to the Sheriff’s Office. In addition to alcohol, officials said speed also was a factor, with witnessing saying Babinec was going 40 to 50 mph when the crash occurred.

He was taken to Memorial Regional Hospital, in Hollywood, where he died Tuesday afternoon.

Lights Out on Cruise Ship; Passengers in the Dark

The Island Star cruise ship, a ship which until last year sailed as the Celebrity Horizon, lost all power for a time last week somewhere off of the coast of France. The entire ship was plunged into darkness. The captain said that the cruise line was flying technicians to the ship for repairs. After the technicians arrived, they apparently repaired the problems for a while. Then less than a day later the same thing happened. Then the captain declared that the cruise was over and called for the 1476 passengers and an undisclosed number of crew to abandon ship. After all of the fear and anguish by the passengers that meant to get into the life boats with their luggage and be ferried to shore. Many of the passengers were elderly. At least two collapsed in the process of abandoning ship.

Island Star cruises is a joint venture between Royal Caribbean Cruise Line and First Choice Holdings. Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines owns Celebrity Cruise Lines. That means that the ship went from one arm of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (Celebrity) to another (the joint venture).

This just in from Las Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — “For all of the right reasons, there has been an increase in awareness about traumatic brain injury in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan,” says David Hovda. As professor and vice chief of research affairs for UCLA’s Division of Neurosurgery and director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, Hovda has several years experience in treating patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) in sports injuries, car accidents and many other life-threatening situations. And Hovda and his neurosurgery team have made a number of breakthroughs in the field of brain injury.

Working in cooperation with Walter Reed Naval Medical Center over the last several years, Hovda says treating the soldiers who return from the Iraq war has yielded some interesting revelations. These have reframed TBI beyond sports medicine and tragic community folklore into a new way to treat head injuries from combat.

“Although severe TBI does occur in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters, the most recent concern has been focused on the mild-to-moderate level of injury to the brain,” he says. “Commonly referred to as concussions, these mild brain injuries often are due to individuals being in close proximity to blasts set off by improvised explosive devices. What is troubling is there is little being done to diagnose if an individual has sustained a mild or moderate TBI.”

Orthapedic Injuries in Personal Injury Cases; Motion Analysis

The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery has recently published an article about a study by orthopedic surgeons about motion analysis. Apparently, this is the study of the gait and walking changes of someone who has suffered an orthopedic injury to the leg. This would include the foot, ankle, lower leg (tibia or fibula), knee, upper leg (femur), the hip or the pelvis.

We have found in our practice here at Hickey Law Firm, P.A. that whenever someone injures their leg or in some other way alters the way they walk, that is their gait, this alters and affects other parts of their bodies. Most commonly, we see back problems after this. Oftentimes the back injury can become as bad or worse than the initial injury which sets off the chain reaction to make the back hurt. That is why measuring the altered gait is so important.

Motion Analysis and Dynamic Electromyography
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References

Motion analysis is an important tool that is used to understand the complexities of movement and lower extremity function. Such a detailed description of function has been valuable for determining both nonoperative and operative management guidelines for individuals with abnormal gait patterns1-4.

Gait-evaluation protocols involving the use of instrumented treadmills are likely to be used in the near future. Riley et al. performed a kinematic and kinetic comparison of overground and treadmill walking in a study of healthy subjects and demonstrated that treadmill gait is qualitatively and quantitatively similar to overground gait and that the mechanics of treadmill and overground gait are very similar5. Having demonstrated the essential equivalence of treadmill and overground gait, the authors proposed the possibility of incorporating treadmill-based protocols into clinical movement analysis.