It's Always a Good Idea to Visit Your Chiropractor After an Auto Accident
Are you dealing with a few aches and pains after a motor vehicle accident? It's not unusual to develop a few aches and pains after an accident. Luckily, a visit to your chiropractor can ease your pain and reduce your recovery time.
How Accidents Affect Your Body
Strong forces exerted on your body cause injuries during car accidents. When your car suddenly decelerates from 60 mph to 0 after hitting another car or a tree, you may be thrown against the side of the car or hit your head against the dashboard. Although your seatbelt helps protect you from serious injury, it doesn't keep your body completely still during an impact. Unfortunately, injuries occur at any speed and aren't limited to high-speed crashes.
The abrupt change in movement during a crash strains muscles, joints, ligaments, and tendons and may even alter the alignment of the vertebrae in your neck and spine.
A car accident triggers your fight-or-flight response and floods your body with adrenaline, a hormone that gives you extra energy to deal with dangerous situations. Thanks to the effects of adrenaline coursing through your body, you may not feel any pain at first. A few hours or days later, you might begin to notice a nagging pain and stiffness in your neck or back.
Using Chiropractic to Combat Pain
Chiropractic treatment eases pain and stiffness and improves range of motion, mobility, and flexibility. Treatments are designed to:
Whiplash and Chiropractic
Whiplash, a painful injury that affects the neck, is a common motor vehicle accident injury. During the collision, your neck whips back and forth or from side to side. The motion may cause misalignments in your vertebrae and damage tissues, muscles, and ligaments. In some cases, whiplash can injure the rubbery discs that cushion your vertebrae.
Massage, spinal manipulation, soft tissue mobilization, ultrasound, and other therapies help injured tissues heal after whiplash and relieve pain, numbness, tingling and headaches, while improving range of motion.
Although chiropractic treatment is most beneficial immediately after an accident, the therapies your doctor uses could help reduce your symptoms even it's been months or years since your accident.
A case report published in the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine examined the benefits of chiropractic for a patient who had been injured in an accident three years prior. After treatment, she reported improvements in pain and quality of life and was finally able to stop taking opioids.
Have you been in a car accident? Make your appointment with the chiropractor today.
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