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Hello everyone, this is Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place here. We're going to be doing a video talking about car accidents, whiplash and what it does to your health, some of the long-term effects that we see from people with whiplash, and why it's so important to get started on your chiropractic care as early as possible. So, this is a study done in the European Spine Journal back in 2002, and what they did is they tracked hundreds of patients over years and years to understand better the effect of whiplash on patients and what happened. How do they heal? Do they get better? And so what they found is that 55% of patients who have had a whiplash-type trauma in a car accident have had symptoms 17 years later after the accident, so that's huge.

That means over half the people with a whiplash-type injury could have symptoms 17 years down the road. So that's a big wow moment for me, when I saw that research and I said, "Gosh, we need to do a video explaining to our patients who have been in a car accident how important chiropractic care is to them, and why it's so important not to wait on this stuff." The basic symptoms that we see for whiplash-type injuries are neck pain, a lot of headaches, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, visual disturbances happen, ringing in the ears, pain radiating into the shoulder, down into the arm, that's a real common symptom as well.

So this is what to look out for when you've had a car accident, and sometimes you won't even feel these symptoms right after the accident. It might show up a few days later. It could be a week or two later when you start noticing symptoms like that. So hopefully, that lets you know, "Hey, there's been a whiplash injury," and when you hear that, over half the people who have these have symptoms 17 years later. The researchers have been pretty darn clear on this for years, the number one thing that you can do if you've had a whiplash injury is starting mobilizing the tissue immediately, so if somebody has a whiplash injury where their neck's been rocked, the most important thing we can do is start working on that, getting chiropractic care, getting massage therapy, working on that for the next four to eight weeks to really settle that tissue down and make sure scar tissue doesn't form, because a lot of these long-term problems we're seeing with these people is because they didn't seek out the appropriate care following their accident, they kind of just let their body "heal."

The body doesn't heal properly in those circumstances in a lot of cases, and that's why 55% of these people end up having chronic long-term problems from whiplash. So when you have a car accident, give us a call so that we can get started as soon as possible because waiting is the biggest enemy for you when you've had a whiplash. That's what leads to long-term chronic problems is waiting. Putting it off, saying, "Oh, it'll heal on its own," just ignoring the symptoms. Do not do that, don't fall for that. It would be best if you started your chiropractic care and started getting under the proper care to heal properly and hopefully not be one of this 55%. So if you have any questions about car accidents or whiplash injuries, neck pain, headaches, stuff like that, give our office a call. We'd be happy to answer your questions. I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place.

Call our office today to schedule an appointment to kickstart your healthy life: 530-221-8443