Tag Archives: whiplash

Benefits of Chiropractic Care After Car Accident (Long Term)

[Transcription]

Dr. Steve Battaglino here. I wanted to share with you some x-rays on a patient that came in after a car accident. She had some neck pain. The neck pain went away pretty quickly, even though you could tell there were some injury there. And we can see it on X-ray, I’ll show you in a second. But, the pain went away fairly quickly after like three visits and she discontinued care. Then shortly after that she ended up moving away and moving back five years later.

So, I started seeing her five years ago after an accident. She was in her early 20s. The pain went away real quickly. She moved away, five years go by and she moves back. So, she came back recently she’s having neck pain again. It’s kind of getting worse and we took another X-ray. So, we see the comparative study between the before and after x rays, called pre and post x-rays, we can see some changes. The pre or the before is on the left-hand side of your screen. So, this is the jaw here on the curve here is actually supposed to go the other way. It’s supposed to go like this. You see she had a whiplash injury where those ligaments that hold the neck get stretched a little bit. It’s like a sprain injury and there’s some injury to the discs when that happens. Disks are in-between the bones here, here, up here.

And so, like I said, the pain went away pretty quickly but then she discontinued care right after that and it wasn’t completely healed. How do we know that? Well, when we took an x, another x-ray this is just last week. This is the post x-ray or the after x-ray. We can see the same areas. If you look here, look at the disk here, looks nice in fat in the back. And, we look at it here and you can see that there is bone spurring. The disc has gotten much thinner. It looks like these bones are getting really close together.

So, what’s happened in that five years is that disk wore down and became dehydrated and smaller and the wear and tear caused these bone spurs to form. The problem was that the bone didn’t really get back into its proper position completely in a way that the thing could heal up completely. So the pain went away. The patient unfortunately soon that was healed up completely because the pain wasn’t there, and you know, we’re just human. So, you know, something else comes onto your plate and you start thinking about a million other things that are more present in your awareness.

So, she failed to get that fixed completely. So, now she’s in her late 20s and we’re trying to get this area fixed. Which it’ll heal to a point where it won’t bother her, but it won’t heal completely. Because, you see now you got these bone spurs that are going to be there for the duration and it becomes more of, you know, the goal becomes more just getting this to heal the best that it can. And, kind of just maintaining it at that level trying to keep those bones first from get worse. So, just a little tip for you to continue care a little bit past where is the pain goes away. Because, that doesn’t, you know the pain goes away. Taking that, that thorn out of your your foot It doesn’t mean that it’s healed completely, it needs time to heal up after that initial pain goes away.

This is Dr. Steve battling this is your health minutes, probably more than a minute. Have a great day.

Chiropractic Care for Whiplash

Leave a reply

Hi. Dr. Steve Battaglino here with Battaglino Chiropractic. Today, I want to talk a little bit about whiplash injuries. Whiplash usually occurs as a result of a motor vehicle accident, like a car accident.  If we analyze that, when you’re sitting in a car driving or as a passenger, you’re usually wearing a seat belt. Hopefully, you are. The seat belt is what makes you, what connects you essentially to the car. So, from the seat belt level down, your trunk and so forth, becomes part of the seat and part of the vehicle that you are in.

Let’s say, you’re driving. Let’s say, actually, you are stopped at a stop light.  A car approaches you from behind, and they’re not paying attention. Maybe they are text messaging. I know you don’t. But let’s say they are. They rear-end you, and what happens is the seat of the car, the trunk of your body moves forward, but the head and neck stay stationary in the first phase.   It looks kind of like this. They move forward, your head stays in the same place, and then it stretches forward violently and kind of whips forward and then whips back like this.

There are three different phases to get injured in. It’s kind of a drag, but what happens is it doesn’t really take a lot of velocity change for these injuries to occur. The injuries are to the muscles, the ligaments of the neck, also the joints, and the discs and nerves in the neck.  Studies show that a change in velocity of as little as five miles an hour… So, let’s say, you are in a parking lot, you are going five miles an hour and you accidentally read-end somebody. Just that change right there can be enough to cause these types of injuries. It doesn’t have to be rear-end or front impact. It can be side impact as well. It kind of stretches the neck like so.

These types of injuries do excellent with chiropractic care. The reason is you might have some damaged muscles or ligaments in there in addition to the discs, the bones, and the nerves. What happens is that they get stretched. They might get a little bit torn. And because the areas of the spine are misaligned due to the injury, or even maybe they existed there prior to the injury, it pulls on those tissues that are already torn and injured. It doesn’t feel so good. Plus, it hinders the body’s ability to heal. By restoring proper alignment gently to these areas, it allows the muscles and joints to heal up more quickly, but also more permanently so that you are not dealing with the same injury down the road.