7-8 million car crashes occur each year with over 3 million whiplash injuries. Of those 3 million, half develop chronic, long-term pain syndromes. There are three important things to know about treatment that can prevent the vast majority of these chronic problems.

Most car crashes are minor and for the most part, the victim feels that he is lucky and needs no care from a professional. Many fear the paperwork and hassles with insurance companies that follow seeking professional help from a chiropractor, physical therapist, or medical doctor. So much so, that most would rather pay cash out of their own pocket than allow the insurance to pay.

A competent whiplash and car accident specialist will evaluate 3 critical components following a whiplash accident. These three areas are the spinal vertebrae, the ligaments and tendons, and the muscles. While all three of these areas work in concert, their treatment can be quite different.

1. The muscles are often evaluated first as they are the easiest to access. Near the surface of the skin, the muscles are often painful due to a tearing of the muscles in the accident. The muscles will swell and the skin can appear red and swollen. Painful to the touch, we try to not touch these muscles and certainly not use them. This often leads to restricting the way we move, the way turn our heads, the way we work, and certainly the way we play and enjoy ourselves. While this may at first seem reasonable, and it may be for a short period, it certainly does not lead to the best outcome in terms of healing. Specific and deliberate movement, exercise, and therapeutic activities are required to restore the muscles to their pre-injury status. A delay or refusal to do these therapeutic activities increases dramatically the chance of chronic, long-term pain syndromes.

2. The vertebrae are evaluated next as they are superficially easy to evaluate with basic range of motion testing. The doctor will usually have you turn your head up, down, and side to side, to attempt to evaluate the extend of injury. While it is true that damage to spinal joints does decrease range of motion, this evaluation method alone is not sensitive enough to pick up often severe forms of joint and bone damage from a whiplash injury. In addition to basic range of motion testing, skilled palpation of the zygapophaseal joints in the neck can often reveal severe misalignments and loss of normal spinal curves. Left uncorrected, loss of neck spinal curve can lead to early degenerative arthritis and chronic pain. The tricky part about this kind of injury is that the majority of the pain won't present itself until 5-8 years from the injury date or sometimes even more. It is of paramount importance to have the cervical spine vertebrae evaluated with radiographs and expert palpation skills to assess the exact amount of spinal damage. Chiropractic adjustments and therapeutic exercise and activities are the only ways known to modern medicine to correct abnormal spinal curves.

3. Lastly, and often never evaluated at all, are the ligaments and tendons. These structures have very little blood supply compared to the muscles and are the reason why some people feel perfectly fine after an accident for several days only to have soreness and pain develop 3-7 days following an accident. As there are very few blood vessels to the ligaments, they swell very slowly and can take days to finally reach their zenith of inflammation. This also means that they heal and rid themselves of swelling quite slowly. As a result, ligament and tendon damage can take 8-20 weeks to completely heal or even more in quite severe accidents. Evaluation of ligament integrity is very important as a lack of integrity, or ligament laxity or tear, can result of slipping or sliding of the vertebrae with catastrophic results and with damage to the spinal cord itself and the nerve roots as they exit the cord.

While a cursory examination is often what is given at emergency rooms and urgent care centers, and to some extent, your family doctor, a more thorough examination is absolutely necessary following a whiplash car accident. While there are relatively few doctors who have completely extensive training in the area of whiplash traumatology, there are usually 1 or 2 in each community who have taken the time to do so. In terms of long-term whiplash outcomes, it is incredibly important that any person involved in such an accident seek out a specialist and follow through to completion an appropriate treatment protocol.

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