When I graduated from Chiropractic school in 1998, I was convinced that my practice would be full of wellness-minded people who wanted to get their bodies up to optimum performance and keep it there. The philosophers at our school promised a Utopia in which people sought our services in droves because they wanted to maximize their human potential. Pain management was not going to be an issue. I was not going to take automobile accident cases because I had been convinced by some of my colleagues that there was an awful stigma associated with taking these cases and there wasn’t much in the way of correction that we could do for these patients anyway. Boy was I wrong. It is hard to admit when you are wrong, but I was dead wrong. We have many wellness-minded people in our practice, and most of them are reaching their physical potential and keeping it. Unfortunately some of them have been in automobile accidents. They needed us more than ever after the accidents happened, so by necessity I have learned how to treat people with whiplash injuries and a host of problems that result from seatbelt injury.
Three times in the past week alone we have seen patients who were already members of our practice get involved in automobile accidents and bring in very bad injuries from seatbelts. Seatbelts are designed to protect your life in the event of an impact, but in many instances they cause injuries to the shoulder girdle and create severe pain, bruising, and muscle tearing when an automobile accident occurs. Most of the time when a seatbelt causes injury, it is from a rear-end collision, a rollover, or the type of impact that the crash test dummies get to experience in all of those funny commercials. The injuries we have seen in the past week are far from funny, however. One lady has an enormous bruise from her clavicle, or collar bone, all the way down below one of her breasts. Another person has a bruised neck, painful rib cage from bone bruising, and muscle spasm so severe in her shoulder that it hurts to move it. A mother and her two children were involved in a t-bone accident where someone ran a red light and impacted their vehicle at a high rate of speed. Her six year old boy had a seatbelt injury that was so bad that his head was tilted to one side and his entire spine was curved to one side. His muscles were in such spasm that it hurt him for me to palpate them. He was complaining of pain, but as he said, “They told me I was fine at the hospital.” It was lucky for him that his mom brought him in anyway. I saw him for the first time after the accident last Thursday and he was 80 percent better after just one treatment.
It is absolutely essential that injuries after motor vehicle accidents be handled as soon as possible after they happen. If that little boy’s mom had left him in the physical shape that he was in after their wreck, he could have very easily developed a scoliosis that would have plagued him for the rest of his life. If his neck had been left to be tilted to one side, nerve pressure would definitely have been an issue and headaches, localized pain, and muscle imbalance would certainly have followed. Physical trauma is one of the main reasons we degenerate. If your body has been traumatized and left to heal on its own without repairing and correcting the problems caused by whatever impact you have suffered, the body senses instability and does what it innately needs to do: tries to stabilize it. This translates into scar tissue formation and in some cases extra calcium deposition that might result in painful spurs down the road. Chiropractors help repair the damage that has been done by trauma every single day. If treatment is started within 72 hours after the injury, the healing time is cut in half and the chance for complete recovery without future problems is greatly increased. Many of the people I see are suffering from degeneration caused by old physical trauma that was left untreated. If some of these injuries had been treated sooner, the degeneration would by no means be as bad as it is now and in many cases would not be there at all.
While it is still true that chiropractic takes people who have nervous system interference caused by vertebral subluxations and helps them to realize their full human potential by releasing that interference, it is also true that those whose bodies have suffered trauma need chiropractors. The sooner your body gets its problems corrected, the better your future will be. Treat your body well.