Whiplash Injuries
Long Term Effects

Transcription

Hello everybody. This is Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place. Today's video is about whiplash injuries and their long-term consequences of them. I have a lot of patients who come here that have had auto accidents in the past, some who have had them recently, so we need to understand when we're in a car accident, what should we do, because long-term, if there are long-term symptoms and problems, how do we try to minimize that risk as best we can, so let's go to the journals that actually study this stuff... This journal was called injury. This study was done in June of 2005, and this study was on whiplash patients and what happens long-term. Do the symptoms still stay there?

And they found that 71% of the whiplash-injured patients that they studied had symptoms seven and a half years later after their accident, about 48% of them had mild, 21% of them had what they'd considered moderate injuries, definitely injuries that were impacting their daily life, and there were 2% that had very severe injuries that needed further investigation to figure out what was going on, but combined we're talking about 71% of people, so seven out of 10 people who have a whiplash injury are going to have symptoms seven and a half years later, that's a lot. So if you're in an auto accident, you've had even what you experience as a mild whiplash injury, sore neck, stuff like that, it may be important for you to take a look at what that injury looks like because a lot of the times with these injuries, you can get some symptoms, and then then they go away. Then maybe a few months later, they start really coming back in a big way. So that's more like chronic whiplash.

When people have these injuries to their neck and upper back, their low back, even if you have these kinds of car accident whiplash style injuries, to understand the nature of that injury very early, whether you have a bunch of symptoms or not, I think it's important for people to be evaluated. And was also stated in this study, what they found was that the greatest potential to influence this whiplash, the greatest potential to help prevent symptoms from developing long-term, the greatest potential they found was in the first 90 days after the accident, meaning the people who sought aftercare early got the best long-term results, and this is something we talk to our patients because this is not the only study that has published that those types of results, there are several peer-reviewed studies now that say that the biggest thing, the single largest thing that you can do to impact long-term whiplash and to prevent that is to get care early.

So this is something we discuss with our clients in our office, mobilizing that tissue, preventing the formation of scar tissue, and doing our due diligence to get this to heal as best we can to minimize this from happening, so if you have any questions, if you're in a car accident, you've been injured, if you haven't sought aftercare, chiropractic care, something to help you, physical therapy, things to help you heal, it's time that you do that and at least start investing in that because the literature is pretty clear on what can happen long-term if you don't.

I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place.

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