Whether you’ve been in an auto accident or suffered a sports-related injury, whiplash is excruciatingly painful. Our structural chiropractor wants you to know more about this condition and how chiropractic treatment can help you quickly regain healthy function.

What Is Whiplash?

Whiplash is an extremely painful soft tissue injury that occurs when the neck is suddenly moved forward and backward. Since this motion typically occurs due to a car or other accident, a lot of force is exerted on the neck area. A whiplash injury typically involves the neck muscles, surrounding ligaments, joints between the spinal vertebrae of the neck, neck discs, and nerve roots.

Symptoms of Whiplash

One of the more puzzling aspects of whiplash is that many people don’t realize they have it for several days. We have seen this many times in our practice and attribute it to the massive stress hormones released following a traumatic auto or other accident. The primary symptoms of whiplash are pain and a stiff neck.

Since the motion that causes a whiplash injury involves the entire upper body, a whiplash injury can cause pain in the shoulder and back. Other common whiplash symptoms include headache, nearby muscle aches, and dizziness. Since the brain is located in such close proximity to the neck, cognitive issues are not uncommon. These can include difficulty concentrating, sleeping, or maintaining a calm, even mood.

Three Benefits of Treating Whiplash With Chiropractic Medicine

Since a whiplash injury can cause so much long-term pain and dysfunction, we believe that everyone needs to get treated for it as quickly as possible. When you arrive in our office with a whiplash injury, we get to work performing a wide range of assessments, examinations, and scans. This gives us the data we need to address your problems as quickly as possible.

Chiropractic medicine provides proven relief for the nerve pain and dysfunction stemming from a whiplash injury. We’re able to say this because our chiropractor painstakingly analyzes how you move, your symptoms, and overall health before matching you with strategic interventions. Depending on your issues, you might receive various hands-on treatments, targeted exercise plans, or balancing nutritional regimens.

Benefit 1: Fast Relief

When you’re in an auto accident, it’s common not to remember every detail. Unfortunately, your body remembers every detail in the form of spinal subluxation. Subluxation is the medical term for misalignment and is the root cause of much of the pain and dysfunction associated with whiplash.

While muscles and ligaments can be damaged as a part of a whiplash injury, such damage heals relatively quickly compared to an untreated spine. A whiplash-causing accident sends the neck swiftly and forcefully forward and backward. When this type of accident occurs, it misaligns the entire spine, not just the portion located in the neck.

A subluxated spinal vertebra can press against or even compress nerves. In addition to causing pain, a misaligned spine can cause dysfunction everywhere in the body. This is because the spinal cord contains nerves that connect the brain to nerves everywhere in the body.

Since nerves relay messages of sensation and movement, they are crucial for everything the body does. This includes movement that you can see, but it also includes activities you can’t see, such as circulation, digestion, and respiration. When the nerves are not free to function optimally, physical function suffers. When they work correctly, the body functions optimally and without pain.

Benefit 2: Relief That Lasts

When we perform a structural chiropractic adjustment on your spine, we aren’t just adjusting it to provide immediate pain relief or even relief for a week. Structural chiropractic focuses on achieving and maintaining the best spinal alignment, according to scientific research. We adjust your spine to relieve pain and give you the tools to help it retain proper alignment.

Our patients are never referred to as “neck strain in bay 1” or “car accident in treatment room 3.” We’re here for much more than just the crisis that brings you to our practice. We’re here to help you take control of your condition.

For patients with whiplash, we adjust your spine to eliminate subluxation and pain while restoring function. We also believe that you must provide your body with high-quality nutrition to optimize tissue rebuilding and, more importantly, optimal nerve and brain function. What we do in the office is to ensure the spine that houses the nerves doesn’t interfere with their operation. The lifestyle interventions we prescribe allow you to optimize your neurological system.

Benefit 3: A Better You

We hate it when our patients tell us that they feel “back to normal.” We don’t think anyone should settle for ordinary when so much more is possible. There is nothing wrong with symptom relief, but life is more than a collection of symptoms to be avoided.

One of the top lifestyle choices we recommend is exercise. While this might seem like the last thing you want to do after a painful accident, walking or another gentle exercise is an excellent way to boost the circulation of healing nutrient and oxygen-rich blood to the injury site. This is particularly true when it is combined with mind-body interventions such as stress reduction.

Mind-body health is another focus area designed to help you live a better life. These approaches may include meditation, deep breathing, and other visualization. Whatever form they take, their goal is to direct your mind toward making beneficial physical changes within your body.

Consider Chiropractic Treatment for Whiplash

We encourage you to seek treatment if you’ve ever been in an auto accident. Whether it happened last week or a decade ago, you have structural changes impacting your body’s functioning. Our Structural Chiropractic team is confident that emailing us at info@structuralchiro.com or calling us at (425) 636-0303 is your first step in healing from a whiplash injury and moving toward better health.