Last October, Alexandre was driving quietly to return home after a dinner with friends.
A few steps from the Jaurès station, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, he narrowly avoids a scooter parked just in front of the cycle lane, "and just behind there was a huge pothole", slips the 28-year-old Parisian .
Except that his self-service scooter crashes into the hole, stops dead.
“And I continued, I did a glide, landing on the chin.
The shock was so violent that my jaw snapped and the shock knocked out my teeth.
It never crossed my mind that I broke my jaw.”
However, medical examinations later revealed a triple fracture, in the chin and on both sides of the mandible.
He must undergo surgery the next day.
The young man will spend more than a month eating liquid to heal.
Today, he is still recovering and must refrain from returning to sport.
During his accident, Alexandre was driving one of the 5,000 self-service scooters deployed in the capital.
Micro-mobility vehicles whose speed is limited to 20 km/h on a large majority of Parisian axes.
“When the first thing that hits the ground is your jaw, it's still a good speed,” points out Alexandre.
30% scooter face injuries
According to an ongoing study conducted in Lyon by teams from the Joint Unit for Epidemiological Research and Transport, Work and Environment Surveillance (UMRESTTE), 30% of scooter accident victims are affected in the face.
“In 2019, the most frequent injuries to the face are above all skin lesions, present in 30% of the injured, then bone lesions, in less than 10%.
As far as dental fractures are concerned, they are present in just under 5% of accident victims, all scooters combined in the register”, specifies Céline Vernet, researcher at UMRESTTE.
In Paris, Dr. Jean-Philippe Foy, maxillofacial surgeon at the APHP, within the stomatology department of Pitié-Salpêtrière, also notes the increase in the number of victims of scooter accidents in his department since the deployment of self-service machines in 2018. This doctor even conducted a study on this subject: “The increase has been significant since 2018, 2019. We have gone from roughly one accident every 45 days to one accident every five to six days.
The most recent so-called “prospective” data even indicate an accident victim received every two or three days in the service.
The most frequent injuries closely resemble Alexandre's experience: "The typical fracture that we observe in jaw fractures is a fall on the chin, often associated with a wound, often associated with trauma dental.
With the fracture at the point of direct impact and by indirect mechanism one or two associated fractures on the upper region of the jaw”, specifies the surgeon of the APHP.
So understand triple fractures, accompanied by many broken teeth.
Other injuries affect higher areas of the face.
The doctor thus points to the scanner of a patient affected in the cheekbone and sinus.
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6,500 euros for dental expenses
“In the vast majority of cases, this type of fracture is treated correctly, without sequelae, reassures Jean-Philippe Foy.
But a good recovery most often requires hospitalization, surgery and a rehabilitation phase of several months.
"Despite this, we can have sequelae in some patients, depending on the degree of complexity of the fracture, with disorders of the dental articulation".
To be concrete, some of these fractures create gaps and gaps when you close your mouth.
For Alexandre, the vast majority of whose teeth were weakened or broken in the accident, it is also the bill at the dentist which is likely to be very salty.
“I will have a minimum of 6,500 euros after reimbursement of the Sécu”, slips this employee in marketing.
Four months after his fall, this almost 30-year-old is still struggling to decipher how he was able to hit the ground with his chin forward, without a scratch or almost on his hands: "The reflex was rather to cling to the handlebars rather than to try to catch me.
It's related to the shape of the scooter, the size of the wheels, and also you have less control than on a bike, ”he tries to explain.
None of the specialists contacted venture, for their part, to affirm that the standing posture on a scooter or the specificities of the machine can induce head-first accidents on the asphalt.
“At present, there are very few scientific studies on the kinematics or the context of scooter accidents, so I am not in a position to be able to answer you on the reason for such injuries.
This is a point on which there is little data.
Several hypotheses can be tested, for example via accident simulations”, slips Céline Vernet of UMRESTTE.
In his study, Jean-Philippe Foy was able to observe that almost 90% of accident victims seen in his service had adopted risky behavior at the time of the accident: either because they were alcoholic or had taken drugs, there were two of them on the machine, whether they were driving at maximum speed or traveling on a sidewalk.
"The other important thing that we observed is that only 12% of patients wore a helmet when using these scooters", punctuates the doctor.