Car Accidents Cause Shoulder Injuries, But Most Doctors Miss Them.
A 2008 study published in the Journal of Orthopedic Surgery and Research discovered that many doctors miss shoulder impingements from car crashes when the person had whiplash injury to their necks.
- 26% of the injured people in the study had shoulder pain after their crash.
- 5% of those injured had a true shoulder impingement.
- Despite this only a little over 1% were diagnosed with a shoulder injury by their treating doctors.
- More than 3 out of 4 shoulder injuries were missed by the treating doctor.
Most often, the seat belt supported shoulder was the shoulder that was injured.
The researchers documented a significant number of whiplash injured patients have shoulder pain that included treatable shoulder impingements.
Often this diagnosis is missed and the shoulder pain is believed to be related to a neck injury by the treating doctor.
The question is why is the shoulder injury so often missed?
Unfortunately, it’s often because the wrong doctors are seeing the injured patients.
Most people involved in an accident are seen by a local ER and then more often than not, their family doctor.
These types of doctors are better suited for managing other types of health problems and generally not the types of injuries that occur in motor vehicle accidents.
Chiropractors experienced in personal injury are much better suited to fully evaluate and manage the types of injuries that occur in a car crash.
It should be noted that not all Chiropractors treat extremity problems like shoulder injuries.
We do help many people with these types of injuries at Hagebusch Chiropractic.
The only way to identify these common injuries is to spend enough time with the injured person going through the full history of what has happened to them, followed by the right exam.
No doctor of any type is ‘magic.’
We can’t use some type of telepathic scanning power to know what is wrong.
The doctors that see car accidents whether a Chiropractor, MD or DO have to spend the time and do the work to find out where the problems are in the injured person in front of us.
This is why we’re here… in order to provide the best care possible to every person.
Reference:
Subacromial impingement in patients with whiplash injury to the cervical spine.Ali Abbassian and Grey E. Giddins. Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research 2008
https://josr-online.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1749-799X-3-25
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