Untreated Whiplash Injury

Transcription

Good morning, everybody. It's about 5:15 AM on Saturday, and you gotta be asking why am I shooting a video that early because there's nothing more exciting on Saturday than to talk about whiplash injuries. I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place, and I just wanna show you guys the progress that can happen with whiplash injuries if they're left untreated. So what we have here in green, we have this, what we call a textbook, normal appearance to the neck. These are x-rays of the neck from the side, and what we're seeing is a nice healthy curve in this person, and that curve helps to support the weight of the head and take stress off the neck muscles.

Now, what we see with whiplash injuries typically is people get this hyper-flexion, hyper-extension injury from a whiplash, and that disrupts and damages the ligaments that hold that neck in place. So we like to take x-rays with those patients because we typically will find this change in the curve that's occurred from the injury. Now, if we wait on that and we don't do anything about that problem, people might say, Oh, it's not that big of a deal, things look okay here." It's not what's going on right then, but what's gonna happen in five to 10 years if we don't address that very serious problem. So what happens if we leave the head like this and leave the neck in this position is that the curve in the spine no longer helps with the weight of the head and the muscles in the neck are typically left to do all of that work.

So these are the people who complain of a chronic neck pain, chronic headaches, maybe they've had a car accident five or 10 years ago, that's what it starts to look like, and then over time, that abnormal amount of stress on the neck begins to wear out the joints in the neck, causing degenerative disc disease, degenerative arthritis, it can cause pressure on the nerves like a pinch nerve feeling.

So with our cases, when it's whiplash injury, we like to get on that quickly because we don't wanna see our patients heading in this direction towards phase two or even worse, phase three, where we have a lot of damage in the spine. There's a lot less we can do for that patient.

So if you've had a whiplash injury and you're interested in not only getting that pain under control, but now preventing long-term problems, give our office a call so we can go over this with you and get you on the path back to health, I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place.