Nine Ways a Chiropractor Can Help You After a Car Wreck

Even if your car wreck was only minor, you can still be left with serious injuries.  Regardless of the severity of the wreck, you should always be evaluated by a medical professional. It’s important to remember that some injuries will not show up immediately and may take days or sometimes even weeks to become apparent.  Insurance companies may deny your medical claims if you do not seek attention within a day or two of the wreck, so it’s always best to be safe and schedule an appointment with your doctor immediately following it.  Your chiropractor will be able to identify and treat potential issues before they worsen.

Here are nine ways a chiropractor can help you after a car wreck:

1. Non-Invasive Treatment Plans

Many doctors are quick to prescribe surgery as the only option for an injury, and if you wait too long to seek help, this may be true.  Surgery should always be your last resort, however, and your chiropractor can offer you non-invasive treatment plans aimed to help you avoid it.  Your chiropractor will realign your joints and your spine, reducing pain and inflammation to help you heal naturally, without surgery.  Your chiropractor will also be able to give you stretching exercises and techniques to help you help yourself between visits. 

2. Reduces Entire Body Pain

After a car wreck, patients can feel widespread pain over their entire body, not just the site of the injury.  Chiropractic therapy releases pain-reducing hormones during treatments that act on both the site of the pain and the entire body soreness that frequently follows car wrecks.  Chiropractic treatment not only reduces pain from the car wreck, but it will also help the patient feel relief from the pain experienced before the wreck happened.

3. Treatment of Hidden Injury Patterns

Whiplash is one of the most common injuries a victim can suffer because of a car wreck.  The wreck itself doesn’t need to be severe to cause the injury, and whiplash symptoms such as soreness, back and neck pain, headaches, and dizziness may not show up immediately.  The only effective way to treat whiplash injuries are with prompt, timely diagnosis and treatment plans.  If you wait for the pain to show, the injury may already be worsening.  To avoid complications of potential injuries, schedule an appointment with your chiropractor immediately after the wreck.  Waiting too long may result in pain and lifestyle changes that could have been avoided.

4. Improves Range of Motion

Inflammation is the enemy of range of motion following a car wreck.  The inflammation blocks essential nutrients and blood flow from getting to the site of the injury, slowing the healing process even more.  In turn, your range of motion is diminished significantly.  Chiropractic treatment provides gentle realignment, mobilizing the spine and restoring its range of motion to speed the healing process.

5. Drastic Reduction in Inflammation

Some car wreck victims may go to the emergency room following the crash for initial evaluation and X-Rays.  This is obviously a good choice, but keep in mind that some injuries involve micro-tears in the muscle and ligaments and cannot be seen on an X-Ray.  These injuries are why people wake up in severe pain the morning after the accident despite being cleared by the emergency room staff.   Your chiropractor’s gentle spinal manipulation will block inflammatory substances known as cytokines, allowing your body to heal naturally and easing pain and inflammation without drugs or invasive procedures.

6. Drug-Free Pain Relief

Addiction to pain medication is a real danger; it sneaks up on patients who initially thought they would just take it for a short time until they feel better.  The truth is, even after a short time on pain medication, a patient can experience withdrawal symptoms and unintentional addiction.  The best way to take pain medication is simply to not take it at all.  Chiropractic therapy will not only treat the symptoms, such as pain, but the source of the pain as well.  Pain medications mask pain, chiropractic care will solve the physical problems causing the pain.

7. Reducing Scar Tissue

After the car wreck, your injury may leave you with scar tissue resulting in stiffness and discomfort.  A chiropractor is specially trained to identify scar tissue and target it with a treatment plan designed to break it apart.  Patients will not only feel better faster, they will also heal much quicker than those who do not seek treatment.

8. Stopping Long-Term Injury

On top of treating immediate problems, chiropractors can stop injury patterns that can result in long-term disability. Untreated whiplash, for instance, can cause problems for years after the initial injury.  The pain can be as emotionally devastating as it is physically debilitating.  Your chiropractor can pinpoint and treat these injuries before they have long-term consequences.

9. File Timely Insurance Claims

While money may be the last thing on your mind after a car wreck, it’s important to understand that insurance companies will not pay medical claims if an initial claim is not made immediately after the wreck.  In their minds, the injury is not severe if you waited to seek medical attention.  Making an appointment with your chiropractor will help you to file claims and receive compensation if you were injured in a wreck that was caused by another driver’s negligence.

How Your Chiropractor Will Help You Heal Faster

Chiropractors are specially trained to deal with the many different types of common injuries that can occur from a car wreck.   They have specialized equipment in their offices for instrument-assisted manipulation and techniques as well as the know-how to target and address injury patterns related to car crashes.

• Soft tissue injuries
• Spinal misalignments
• Nerve damage
• Vertebrae damage such as dislocations, fractures or crush injuries
• Ligament damages
• Spinal cord damage
• Muscle damage

These types of injuries are best treated by a chiropractor because they affect the musculoskeletal system, which is this practitioner’s area of expertise.  They correct nervous system and musculoskeletal injuries through a series of gentle spinal manipulation combined with pressure release techniques and other natural therapies.  Chiropractors offer the most effective, non-invasive and drug-free treatment options for the victims of car wrecks.  They will restore your mobility and range of motion without the side effects of surgery or addictive medicine.

What Can I Expect from a Chiropractor Visit?

Chiropractors use gentle manual manipulation and a series of other treatments to realign the spine, taking pressure off injured nerves, resolve subluxations, and promote healing.  You will feel immediate relief of pain, tingling and numbness associated with whiplash or other car wreck injuries.

The doctor can use a hands-on approach to massage and manipulate the spine or can blend techniques to include heat, ice and exercises along with the manual adjustments.

Unlike traditional treatment plans that involve drugs or invasive techniques and may only mask pain symptoms, your chiropractor is specially trained to relieve these symptoms while addressing the underlying injury right at its source.

When you are making your notifications after a car wreck, make sure one of those calls is to your chiropractor to schedule an immediate post-accident evaluation.