Car Accidents & Chiropractic Care

"If I'm in a low speed car accident and don't have any problems, why should I check with my chiropractor?"  I wish I had a dollar for every time that question was asked...I'd truly be rich.  Seriously though, that's a legitimate question; I do have a legitimate answer.

Think of your head as a bowling ball and your cervical spine as a rubber pencil, trying to support it.  While not an exact representation, the image is not so very far from the truth when it comes to the physics of an injury like a low speed (or high speed, for that matter) impact.  The reason why I am talking about low speed impact accidents rather than high speed ones is that the resulting injuries are very different, depending upon the speed.

A low speed impact injury (under 25 mph) is very similar to the type of injury that one experiences in a fall, moderate impact to the face or a moderate sport's injury.  These types of injuries are ones that the majority of us experience throughout our lives.  Normally, we don't feel any significant after effects and we typically forget about the incident/incidents.  Unfortunately, our bodies do not forget about them.  In fact, the nervous system remembers and records the injury in its neurons and that changed information is then fed back to our musculoskeletal system.  Then, our body compensates for the changed information, forcing structures to perform duties for which they weren't designed.  Unless and until the CNS is "reprogrammed" with the corrected, originally designed information, our body will continue to perform its functions in an unbalanced manner, which eventually leads to more imbalance and pain.

It can, literally, take years for symptoms to appear.  And, worse, few health care professionals are able to make the connection between what is now happening and what originally caused the problem, so people end up with pain prescriptions that deal only with symptoms.  That's what we usually see....the person who has significant but diffuse symptoms due to injuries incurred years ago.

My suggestion is for anyone who has had a car accident or impact injury, with or without symptoms, to have a chiropractor who understands what to look for check them out.  Your future self will be really, really grateful.

Drs. Esther & Thomas
drkollars@gmail.com
thomaskollars109@gmail.com