Right, and as I said, I never say never about anything. Of course you can have a ruptured spleen from blunt trauma. However, in this case, we know, 100% for sure from the autopsy, that this diver did not have a ruptured spleen, liver or clinically significant intra-abdominal hemorrhage.
BTW, getting hit by a helmet during a tackle is a lot more force, and more directed over a smaller area, than in a fall. It's not the weight of the equipment, it's the force of impact. If you fall, the force is proportional to the acceleration from gravity over a distance of 2-3 feet. With a tackle, it's proportional to the force of the player running into your abdomen at full tilt. Not even close. That's why the medical literature has lots of cases of sports injuries causing internal trauma, but not a lot from falling down, even carrying heavy stuff. Interestingly, one of the sports with a relatively high fatality rate is baseball. A baseball, weighing a few ounces, can be accelerated fast enough from a bat to cause a fatal brain injury or a cardiac standstill.
---------- Post added December 18th, 2013 at 01:20 PM ----------
The relevant number here is pressure, which is defined as force divided by area (p=F/A). This is why if you lie down on a single nail it will puncture you, but a bed of nails won't. Same force in both cases: f=MA, your weight = your mass x the acceleration of gravity). But if all 150 lbs of it is applied to a single nail, it will cause trauma that it won't when divided over hundreds of nails. This is also why you can kill someone with a bullet that only weigh a few grams by accelerating it fast enough, and by there being a small area over which that force is applied.
As far as some degree of blunt trauma being present, that's what I was talking about in an earlier post. Probably everyone who falls has some sort of soft tissue trauma, but only those people who get autopsies soon after have it documented! And it was described as not being enough to be a contributing cause of death, from what I recall.
Finally, to really answer your question, we would need to know how much force (or specifically, pressure) a human can stand before suffering a fatal injury. Even if you were wearing dive gear equal to your own weight, that would only double the amount of force (given the constant acceleration from gravity). Like I always say, there is a bell curve for everything, and I'm sure that there are case reports of all sorts of odd accidents, but it's unlikely that a species would have evolved where the LD50 for abdominal trauma was only twice what you might suffer from tripping on the sidewalk carrying nothing.
BTW, getting hit by a helmet during a tackle is a lot more force, and more directed over a smaller area, than in a fall. It's not the weight of the equipment, it's the force of impact. If you fall, the force is proportional to the acceleration from gravity over a distance of 2-3 feet. With a tackle, it's proportional to the force of the player running into your abdomen at full tilt. Not even close. That's why the medical literature has lots of cases of sports injuries causing internal trauma, but not a lot from falling down, even carrying heavy stuff. Interestingly, one of the sports with a relatively high fatality rate is baseball. A baseball, weighing a few ounces, can be accelerated fast enough from a bat to cause a fatal brain injury or a cardiac standstill.
---------- Post added December 18th, 2013 at 01:20 PM ----------
The relevant number here is pressure, which is defined as force divided by area (p=F/A). This is why if you lie down on a single nail it will puncture you, but a bed of nails won't. Same force in both cases: f=MA, your weight = your mass x the acceleration of gravity). But if all 150 lbs of it is applied to a single nail, it will cause trauma that it won't when divided over hundreds of nails. This is also why you can kill someone with a bullet that only weigh a few grams by accelerating it fast enough, and by there being a small area over which that force is applied.
As far as some degree of blunt trauma being present, that's what I was talking about in an earlier post. Probably everyone who falls has some sort of soft tissue trauma, but only those people who get autopsies soon after have it documented! And it was described as not being enough to be a contributing cause of death, from what I recall.
Finally, to really answer your question, we would need to know how much force (or specifically, pressure) a human can stand before suffering a fatal injury. Even if you were wearing dive gear equal to your own weight, that would only double the amount of force (given the constant acceleration from gravity). Like I always say, there is a bell curve for everything, and I'm sure that there are case reports of all sorts of odd accidents, but it's unlikely that a species would have evolved where the LD50 for abdominal trauma was only twice what you might suffer from tripping on the sidewalk carrying nothing.
