When is the last time you were in a car accident in Boise or anywhere? The fear, the rush, the relief…and OH, the stress!!! The stress that goes on for weeks or months after. What a huge inconvenience! After all that, that’s the good news! Ultimately what matters is that everyone is safe. If you were injured, you know exactly what I mean.
What you may not know is that car accident injuries are studied extensively by medical and insurance industries. Injuries related to car accidents have very specific protocols and rehabilitation needs. This is very important for you to understand and why I’m putting together this 3 part series on car accident injuries for you.
Part I will teach you about neck injury and whiplash and what to expect and watch out for. Part II will discuss, low impact collisions and children. Finally, Part III will long term damage and disease. For your benefit, all the parts will discuss the importance of proper care, my clinical experience, and the best ways you can avoid serious long-term health problems related to the injuries.
Neck Injury and Whiplash
The neck injury commonly known as whiplash has been studied extensively due to the nature of how severe and diverse the long-term affects can be. Whiplash is actually a series of multiple ligament sprains and muscle strains in the neck. These tissues are actually designed to stretch and tear under extreme conditions to save the spinal cord from damage. If they’re damaged that means they did their job and saved you from a life threatening spinal cord injury!
Ligament sprains, or whiplash, in the spine follow the same American Medical Association healing guidelines as any other joint ligament. Healing time is typically 6-12 weeks if unimpeded and stressed. Healing can take longer due to the moving parts of the spine and isn’t easily braced to limit motion. Spinal alignment and motion, or biomechanics, is critical to protecting the spinal cord and preserving the life of the spinal bones. Bad biomechanics in the spine leads to arthritis, bone spurs, disc decay and eventually joint fusion, any of which could require surgery and years of suffering. These conditions develop slowly over decades.
When the joints heal and ligaments tighten back up, think how critical it is that the alignment and biomechanics are as perfect as possible! This is where chiropractic care becomes critical. No other specialty helps ensure proper spinal biomechanics, nerve protection, reduce pain and speed healing time like chiropractic. An experienced chiropractor will follow established protocols, perform expert diagnostic testing and create a care plan that gets you back to pre injury status as soon as possible.
After 15 years I’ve taken care of thousands of people with whiplash in Boise. I specialize in care of the neck to ensure fast, complete healing, and perform a very thorough intake, including functional testing, neurological diagnostics and x-ray. Matter of fact I regularly receive requests from other doctors to help with difficult neck cases. I deliver gentle care you can trust with the best technology. I even have attorney’s and surgeons who refer patients to me for this very reason.
If you’ve been in a car accident call my office right away. I have had literally thousands of patients who never got proper treatment after an accident come to me for care decades later with horrible decay, disc degeneration and bone fusions that could have all been easily prevented by proper care immediately after the accident.