A SPINE SURGEON’S READ This scan is real. The viral story is not.

You have probably seen this 3D CT posted as a high-speed motorcycle crash, with the spine “snapped in half” and the pelvis “beyond repair.” I am a spine surgeon. That is not what this picture shows. What I can see is high-energy blunt trauma. The face and skull are badly fractured. The head is distracted from the neck, which is the dangerous spinal injury on this view, not a mid-back cut in two. There are multiple rib fractures. The pelvic ring is disrupted. That pelvis injury can bleed fast enough to kill, and it is not beyond repair. The red is a color setting on the 3D render. It is not a map of shattered bone. No one has produced the case, so I will not invent a motorcycle crash for a scan I did not read. Motorcycle crashes do cause this pattern. So do car ejections and falls from height. A helmet only solves one part of it. The brain, the chest, the belly, and the pelvis take the rest. — Dr Steven Cyr • Orthopedic Spine Surgeon Follow SASpine for the health news, and for the correction when a viral scan gets the anatomy wrong. #SpineInjury #MotorcycleSafety #PelvicFracture #KnowTheAnatomy #HealthNews