Chiropractic Treatment for Car Accident & Whiplash

Car Accident Neck & Back Injury: Whiplash

During a whiplash injury to the cervical spine, or neck, the muscles and ligaments are overstretched, and those soft tissues are damaged.  This leads to scar tissue being laid down to repair the damage.  This tissue is stronger than the original tissues, but it is less pliable.  Additionally these fibers are laid down haphazardly, in a random fashion.  This causes the joints in the neck to move differently, which leads to altered movement of the spine and could lead to chronic problems.  Besides pain relief, this is one of the most important reasons to receive proper treatment and rehabilitation following a car accident. 

Chiropractic Care Provides Gentle Pain Relief for Whiplash

Our initial focus following an injury is to provide pain relief with gentle treatments, to avoid aggravating the injury.  As the pain starts to subside, we progress our treatments to focus on restoring normal joint motion and function.  Keeping correct motion in the spine allows the soft tissue to heal in a way that helps insure the new tissue is moving more similarly to the original tissue.  This is commonly referred to as “reforming” the scar tissue.  Massage therapy may be used to assist this with this process.

Therapeutic Massage & Physical Therapy for Rehabilitation in Auto Accident Injuries

In addition to the Chiropractic and Massage treatments, Physical Therapy following a whiplash injury is essential not only to assist in the range of motion, but to retrain the muscles to adapt to the new tissue.  This part of the treatment will usually begin with gentle stretching.  At first this stretching may be done by the therapist.   A home stretching program will be put together for you and the therapist will instruct you on how to perform them correctly.  The final phase involves strengthening exercises which will be under the supervision of the therapist, and again a home program will be crafted to suit your injury.  These exercises are to help stabilize the injured areas and help prevent re-injury.

As you can see, a comprehensive and integrated approach to rehabilitation for whiplash injuries is essential to recover from automobile and whiplash injuries.    

Call our North Olmsted, Ohio chiropractic care clinic today to schedule an evaluation and see if we can help with your disc injury.