Have You Ever Suffered from Whiplash Injury?
Whiplash injury can be painful – if you’ve been in a car crash, you might know this since you may have suffered a whiplash injury. Out of all neck injuries, whiplash injury is unfortunately relatively common.
What is Whiplash Injury?
Whiplash, a non-medical term, is an injury to the soft tissue of the neck. Whiplash is also known as neck sprain or neck strain. Severe whiplash injury can also involve neck injuries to the joints, discs, muscles and nerves.
What Causes Whiplash Injury?
Whiplash can be caused by a jolting backwards and forwards motion of the neck. This type of motion is common in a car accident. It is an abnormal force causing your neck to move out of its normal range of motion.
The most common cause of whiplash is car accidents. Importantly, the speed at which the collision occurred, or the amount of damage to the car, do not necessarily relate to the intensity of neck injuries that can result. Nor do seatbelts.
It is the energy produced by a car crash that can cause whiplash injury on an individual due to the abnormal forces on the neck. Whiplash can be more severe depending on the position of your neck at impact, such as whether your neck was rotated or in an inclined position. Severity can also depend on individual tolerance levels to the abnormal motion produced by a car crash on the neck.
Symptoms of Whiplash
Neck pain from a whiplash injury can show up right away, or can be delayed until some time after the injury. Symptoms of neck injuries that can indicate whiplash can include:
- Difficulty moving your head
- Swelling to the neck
- Tenderness
- Muscle spasms in the neck
- Headache
- Dizziness
- Burning or pins-and-needles type feelings
- Back pain
- Shoulder pain
- Pain shooting down into either shoulder or arm
- Stiffness in the neck
- Trouble with chewing and swallowing
- Hoarseness when speaking
Treatment of Whiplash Injury
If you suffer from any neck injuries, the most important thing you need to do is to get treated by your doctor.
If your doctor diagnoses a whiplash injury, he or she may prescribe pain relievers, muscle relaxants, range of motion exercises and/or physical therapy. Sometimes heat therapy can be effective.
Depending on the injury, some people may be treated with a cervical collar – a soft collar worn around the neck for a few weeks. If the injury is prolonged, some individuals may need to resort to cervical traction, or local anesthetic injections. In a minority of people, severe whiplash can damage the discs, and surgical repair may be necessary in those cases.
Don’t Let Your Neck Injuries Be Minimized
Make sure your insurance company isn’t minimizing your neck injuries. It’s important to stay attuned to any injuries you suffer from a car accident to make sure you recover fully. Don’t let lingering physical pain be minimized until it flares up and starts to affect you significantly.
Hopefully, if you have suffered from a whiplash injury, you’ll recover fully. Most people can expect to recover in the first six weeks or so. However, for others, the recovery process can take significantly longer. No matter what course of recovery your neck injuries take, you need to make sure you get regularly treated by your doctor.
For those who don’t recover fully and the pain lingers for months or even years, treatment can become expensive and can interfere with your life. Make sure you get treated properly by everybody involved.
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