Specifically, what whiplash is, what causes it, and how chiropractic can help heal from whiplash. So, when you’re in a car accident and you get hit from behind. Let’s say you’re parked or at a red light, someone rear ends you from behind. What happens. This is the spine from the side view, you’re looking this way. You get hit from behind and you know the headrests that are in most cars, even that nice fancy cars, are just not very good. That’s a whole other subject, but basically the rest makes contact with the back of the head. This is the base of the skull here. So, the heads like this. The head makes contact with the headrest or maybe it doesn’t in most cases. When there’s an impact from behind, the head goes like this. And the spine and the neck kind of gets folded into that area where there’s no headrest. So, basically, you’re getting hit from behind. It’s doing this and then you’re getting flung forward like this and then you’re coming back to neutral.
Technically, whiplash is called a hyperextension-hyperflexion injury. So, hyper means you’re doing it too much. You’re extending and then you’re whipping forward and then you’re coming back like that. So, there’s a lot of injury that can happen in that little moment of time. There’s tearing of ligaments and muscles around the neck. But also, the discs get injured. You can see these are the bones of the spine and the cervical spine, the neck. And then from the front we see some discs. These are called intervertebral discs, they’re like little shock absorbers in between each of these bones. They’re soft tissue, there you know tough and durable but they’re still soft tissue. And they separate the bones out to create spaces for these nerves to come out.
You’ve got a lot of nerve flow coming out of the neck. If you think about all the fine motor skills that you can do and all the sensitive touch that you have in your fingers and hands. And plus, all the muscles and all the different organs that get run from this area, there’s a lot of nerve flow that comes out of these cables.
So, when there’s an injury like a whiplash you’re doing injury to, not only the muscles and ligaments, but also to these discs and to these nerves. So, we want to try and rehab this injury so that it heals well. And so, the symptoms go away. But also, so that long term you’re not going to have an injured neck that just gets worse and worse.
Chiropractic is the solution for this because you know this is a structural problem where the disc. You know when you have an injury it’s doing this to the disc. It’s stretching it out and injuring it that way. So, the disk is supposed to sit like this like a shock absorber, so it’s supposed to do this. When it comes like this, it is, you know going to injure that disk, the fibers inside it. So, it’ll start to swell. That’s the body’s first reaction. It will swell into the cavity where these nerves are coming out. The nervous swell because it’s been injured. And the body really can’t fix all of it. It just, the best that I can do is to immobilize it and keep it from getting more hurt. So, the muscles get really tight and limit any range of motion. It gets really stiff. It’s just like a cast. So instead of putting like a plaster of paris cast around the neck, the body is using those muscles to splint the area. So, the muscles get really sore and tight as well over time.
What we want to do is reverse this problem and create better alignment in those areas that have been injured so that they can heal properly. Take pressure off the discs and nerves and the pain goes away and then the muscles relax and so everything starts to heal up. And you know the pain goes away, which is the main complaint that patients typically have after an injury like this. But again, these nerves are going to run really important things, we want to make sure that nerve flow going to these nerves is, you know, turned up.
I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic and this has been your health minute.