Ways Non-Surgical Spinal Decompression Will Help After a Car Accident

After a car accident, victims can be hurt in many ways.  The injuries can show up immediately in the form of pain and swelling, or they can take days or sometimes even weeks to show.  Non-surgical decompression can benefit these common injury patterns and keep them from worsening.

Common Injuries After a Car Accident

Car accidents cause many types of injuries, but some are more prevalent than others.   Obviously, some of these will need to be treated immediately in the emergency room, while others are subtler and can be missed in the excitement following a car crash.

Head Injuries

Head injuries are caused when passengers and drivers strike their heads on windows, the dashboard, the metal frame of the door, the steering wheel, and occasionally each other.  A head injury is considered a very serious condition, and can cause many issues from short term, such as a concussion, to long-term problems including skull fractures, comas, hearing loss, cognitive and memory disturbances, and vision problems.  A significant head injury will lead to extensive and costly medical treatment and the possibility of long-term medical care.

Back Injuries

Car crash victims are also susceptible to back injuries.  These can range in severity from sprain injuries to significant damage involving the nerves or the spinal cord.  Any spinal cord injury has the potential to be serious.  If the damage is severe, it can lead to the loss of sensation to the body, loss of control of the limbs, or permanent paralysis.

While not as devastating as spinal injuries, disc herniation from a car crash can lead to disability, muscle weakness, tingling and numbness in the limbs, and pain in the arm, leg or back.

Neck Injuries

Neck injuries are another common problem with car accidents.  The most common neck injury is whiplash, which is a sudden snapping of the head and neck from an indirect blunt force, such as being rear ended.  Whiplash can cause very real damage to the ligaments and muscles in the neck. Injury patterns of whiplash can differ between victims, depending on several things such as the speed and force of the accident and the overall health of the person involved.  Not only can a whiplash victim suffer swelling and neck pain, sometimes they can suffer a temporary paralysis of their vocal cords.

Chest Injury

The forces at play during a car accident can result in very serious chest injuries, including broken ribs.  While broken ribs don’t sound dangerous by themselves, they can puncture a victim’s lungs and result in other injury patterns and internal bleeding.  Traumatic cardiac arrest can occur from the force of the impact of the accident.

Other injuries include abdominal injuries to internal organs and damage to the pelvis.  Any injury that involves the chest or torso requires an immediate medical evaluation by an emergency room physician.

Broken Bones

 Broken bones are quite common after vehicle accidents.  Legs, feet, arms and hands are frequently injured, often broken and sometimes dislocated.

If you are a pedestrian struck by a car, you may be at risk for a combination of all injuries at once.  Motorcyclists are also at a higher risk for significant injury; without the protection of a car, they can be ejected and suffer trauma that involves many concurrent injury patterns including multiple fractures, internal injury, head injuries, and serious ligament damage like a torn ACL.

Emotional Distress

Even passengers or drivers who do not suffer significant injury themselves can be emotionally scarred from the incident.  Since people share cars with those who are closest to them, such as friends and family, serious car accidents can emotionally affect those who witness the injury of passengers in the car.  It’s not unusual that victims of a car accident may require psychological evaluation or treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and other emotional disturbances in the days following the incident.

Using Non-Surgical Decompression to Treat Injuries After a Car Accident

Chiropractors are specially trained to identify and treat many injuries that occur from a car accident, as well as many other painful and debilitating conditions.  Non-surgical decompression is a popular and effective treatment for:

• Whiplash
• Neck and back pain
• Sciatica (weakness, tingling and pain that spreads down the leg)
• Diseased and injured spinal nerve roots
• Herniated or bulging discs
• Degenerative disc disease
• Posterior facet syndrome (worn spinal joints)

Non-surgical spinal decompression gently stretches the spine using a motorized traction device to change the position of the spine and the forces affecting it.  The technique creates negative pressure in the gel-like cushions between your vertebrae, called spinal discs, and takes painful pressure off of them while allowing them to regain their natural height.  This allows the herniated or bulging disc to retract, relieving the pressure on your nerves and other spinal structures. When this pressure is relieved, healing is promoted by a stronger movement of nutrients, water and oxygen to the injury site.  Non-surgical decompression is an extremely useful tool for correcting injuries and relieving pain, allowing optimal health for your discs and spine.

Other Therapies Being Investigated?

Historically, spinal misalignments and imbalances were addressed by inserting screws or other devices into the spine with the hopes that these interventions would stabilize the spine and promote healing.  Using a Charite or a fabricated disc alternative may be helpful in the future, but for now, the research isn’t firm enough to support these therapies.

The process of disc degeneration involves the loss of important cells in the disc itself, so another way of healing disc injury focuses on rebuilding damaged cells within the discs with adipose tissues.  Some promising approaches involve reversing certain biological cell changes, such as cell death and the spread of diseased cells within the disc.  Biologists are hoping to prove that implanting healthy cells can slow the aging of disc tissues.  These alternatives for healing discs seem to be promising and have shown to be effective in animal studies, but they haven’t yet received the amounts of study required for human trials yet.

Non-Surgical Spinal Decompression is a Valuable Tool for Your Recovery

Non-surgical spinal decompression involves fixing faulty musculoskeletal issues in the spine itself.  It can reverse wear and tear and provide increased mobility by relieving pressure and improper vertebral movements that can injure the discs themselves.  The constant misalignment of the discs is a known factor for causing disc degeneration as well as more problems within the body; a misaligned spine can even damage muscles in the abdomen.

After a car accident, it’s important to be evaluated and start chiropractic treatment, including non-surgical spinal decompression, immediately to improve your chances for a full, speedy recovery.