Any substantial blow to your body, whether from a car accident, contact sports, or an accident at work, can cause whiplash or other neck injuries and warrants a thorough chiropractic checkup.  The biggest danger with whiplash injuries is that the symptoms take years to develop.  Too often, people don't seek treatment until more serious complications develop. 

Even after whiplash victims settle their insurance claims, some 45 percent report they still suffer with symptoms two years later.  So don't wait, call our office and get it checked out.

Car Accident Factoids

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If you have been involved in a car accident, it is very likely that you have sustained an injury. The extent of the injury is dependant on the forces that were involved during your accident and can vary from soft tissue damage to serious injury. However, the extent of injury can be deceiving, especially if the speed of the vehicles was slow. An accident at 10 mph can actually cause significant injury to the spine and surrounding soft tissues depending on the position of the body during impact.

Whatever the extent of your injuries, you will need to know just how these injuries can affect your health in the short and long term and what kind of treatment will effectively restore the injury to optimal health and function.

Short Term

The short-term effects of car accident injury are obvious…pain and stiffness. Pain and stiffness are the result of damaged tissue in the body much like that of a bruise or sprain. The supporting tissues of the neck and back become stressed to the point of damage when the spine is whipped around during the accident. The damaged tissues then enter into the healing process, which includes swelling and tissue repair. Depending on the extent of the injury, this process can take a very long time. Current evidence reveals that even minor trauma will cause long-term effects if not properly treated.

With a car accident injury, we are usually told by our medical doctor to rest and take pain medication, or to attend a period of physical therapy sessions. After a few days or weeks, the pain subsides and we think we are back to normal. Unfortunately, this is not the case as you will read in the long term effects of car accident injury.

Long Term

When the tissues of our body have been damaged, the way that they function changes. This results in improper wear and tear of joints and supporting structures. This can be compared to an old elastic band. Everyone has tried to use an old elastic band and found it to be more rigid and less elastic. Some of them will break when you try to stretch them. We just discard it and get a new one.

The soft tissues of our body (muscles, tendons and ligaments) have elastic properties much the same as an elastic band. This elastic property is what absorbs energy and prevents us from becoming injured from our everyday activities. Sometimes, however, we fall or get into a car accident and the elastic properties of our tissues cannot absorb the stress. They become stretched or tear and we feel the resulting pain from the damages. The pain will go away in time, but if the tissues are not treated correctly, permanent scarring will result or the tissues will not return to their normal function.

Scarring is a normal aspect of tissue healing and occurs with all injury. Whether or not the scar tissue is resolved and replaced by healthy tissue is dependant on the extent of the damage and the type of tissue involved. Scarring is also dependant on the type of treatment performed while the healing process is occurring. If improper or incomplete treatment is performed, scarring will become permanent and long-term complications will result.

The danger of improper treatment is long term effects resulting from changes in the way the joints function in the neck and back. Although the soft tissues may have healed, if they are scarred or have changed function, the joint function will also change. Over time, the joints will become damaged because of wear and tear.

This can be compared to the alignment of the wheels on your car. If you accidentally bump into the curb while you are driving, the front wheel may become misaligned a tiny bit. You may not even notice anything and continue driving. One day you will look at your tire and notice that the outer edge is wearing out faster than the rest of the tire, but since it doesn't affect your driving you may not do anything about it. Soon, your tire may start to squeal when you turn corners, but you don't do anything about it. After a while, your steering wheel may shake at certain speeds and it may pull to one side. You continue driving when one day you are on the highway and your tire blows. We all know how dangerous that can be.

A similar thing occurs when we have an injury from a car accident. When the initial pain and swelling is gone, we are left with a misalignment in our spine because the damaged soft tissues have not been properly treated. We may go for years without any complaint or we may have continuing problems that the medical doctor tells us we have to live with. This is very damaging to the long-term health of your spinal joints. They begin to degenerate from the date of the accident until proper function and tissue health are restored. The longer they are left to deteriorate, the more difficult it is to correct the problem.

Treatment

The type of treatment received after injury is vital to proper healing. In fact, if improper or insufficient treatment is given, the resulting complications can become very difficult to deal with and long-term problems can develop.

The kind of treatment that we are used to when involved in a car accident is a course of physical therapy and medication to help with the pain. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient to ensure complete healing of the injury. Hopefully, you have already read about what chiropractic is and does and realize that taking medication does not make the problem go away, it merely masks the pain while the problem continues. Although pain medication has its uses, it is not indicated with injury because it creates a false sense that the area is healed when it is not. Physical therapy is an important aspect of healing because its objective is to balance and strengthen injured soft tissues. Unfortunately, working on the soft tissues does not correct the misalignments of the spine. As the injured tissues heal, they are healing out of place. Once they heal out of place, they create a change in the biomechanics of the spine resulting in arthritis and degeneration in the future.

This is why many people begin to have problems with their necks and backs many years after a car accident and they don't relate the car accident to their current problem. This is also why it is imperative to ensure that the injury is corrected properly in the first place.

Click here to find out what you can do about getting proper treatment after a car accident.

To make an appointment, call 703.288.1702

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