Lifelong Pain From Whiplash?

Texarkana Car Accidents Can Cause Chronic, Ongoing Neck Pain, Headaches, and Other Problems.

Accidents can cause lifelong pain that interferes with your work, home and other daily activities.

People far to often have chronic pain after a car crash related injury.

In the past before we had the research showing otherwise, healthcare practitioners would see people with ongoing symptoms and pain and not understand the pain. Today healthcare practitioners that are up on the latest research realize that there are changes that occur in the brain and nervous system that create chronic pain.

During a car crash, the soft tissues in your body can be stretched or torn as you are quickly thrown about within the vehicle.

The spinal ligaments and discs are particularly susceptible to these forces.

The injured areas deep within the spine become inflamed as your body responds to the trauma and injuries. Pain signals fire up into the brain.

The brain then can cause the muscles around to injury to tighten up/spasm to protect the injury. This acts in a similar way to when we sprain our ankle and the ankle is unstable, we can tape it to reinforce the joint and prevent excessive motion.

The contracted muscles essentially do the same thing after a spinal injury from a collision (commonly called whiplash).

The problem is that the losses of motion slow soft tissue healing and often will result in excessive scar tissue formation during the healing process.

The scar tissue is stiffer and has more pain type nerves in it. The losses of motion and the stiffness both reduce movement. Movement is critical to turn off the pain type nerves.

This is one reason that Chiropractic Care is critical to avoiding chronic pain. Chiropractors are excellent at restoring movement within a joint, particularly the small spinal joints injured in a motor vehicle collision.

As the pain continues, our pain pathways into the brain become stronger and more efficient in a similar way that a muscle that is exercised becomes stronger.

So we have soft tissue injuries in the spine, primarily/most commonly to ligaments. The injury results in muscle spasms and scar tissue formation as well as the accumulation of various chemicals of inflammation.

This results in increased pain activity driving the pain system to become more efficient and more likely to continue firing (meaning more pain).

The longer this goes on, the greater the likelihood of firing the pain system with less stimuli. This is chronic pain, an efficient more easily activated pain system that often can effect how you feel pain in other areas of the body.

Research has found changes in brain function of chronic pain patients with an advanced imaging called a PET scan.

This means that you end up with not just a local injury to your neck for example which can be extremely bad in and of itself… but now you get neurological changes in the brain from that original injury.

If you’ve been injured in a recent Texarkana accident or had a past whiplash injury where you developed chronic pain, we’re here to help at Hagebusch Chiropractic Texarkana!

Dr. Hagebusch, a Texarkana Chiropractor, can help you by finding the cause of your pain and work with you to develop a treatment plan to help you reduce your pain and reclaim your health.

Contact us today so we can get you back on the road to recovery!

References
Stone AM, Vicenzino B, Lim EC, and Sterling M. Measures of central hyperexcitability in chronic whiplash associated disorder – A systematic review and meta-analysis. Manual Therapy 2012; [Epub ahead of print on September 1].