Far too many people involved in a car accident take their whiplash injury symptoms seriously. Even more dangerous are those people who do not experience immediate pain and assume they were not injured.
Many people assume that a low speed accident can’t cause injury. WRONG!
Many people assume that if there is no damage to the vehicle they aren’t injured. WRONG!
And, far too many people make the mistake of thinking their whiplash injury will heal fully on its own and not cause any future problems. WRONG!
The reality is that according to the NIH (National Institute of Health there is NO correlation between occupant injury, vehicle speed and/or damage. They have conducted crash tests that show that a change in vehicle velocity of as little as 2.5 mph can cause injury.
My Story
I was driving a car when I was 18 years old and got in a head on collision. I was taken by ambulance to the hospital where I received stitches to a forehead laceration and sent on my way.
I assumed that was the end of the story. More than a year later I was in college experiencing daily neck and shoulder pain, regular headaches, lower back pain, and fatigue. A family friend referred me to her chiropractor and it was then that we traced my challenges to that car accident.
My year of no treatment has resulted in long term neck challenges and degenerative arthritis. Don’t make the same mistake.
Whiplash Injury Symptoms
While the majority of serious whiplash injuries occur as a result of a vehicle collision, they can just as easily happen from a fall or high impact sports like skiing, snowboarding, soccer, football, and gymnastics.
As we will explore the onset of symptoms and their initial severity don’t always correlate with the long term implications.
When do symptoms show up? Although many people experience neck pain immediately after a whiplash injury many do not experience pain until a few hours, days, or weeks later.
The older you are the less motion you have in your neck to start with and in general the more severe the injuries will be. A whiplash injury to a neck with degenerative arthritis will likely be more severe than a younger healthy neck.
However, that healthy neck needs proper treatment to avoid that arthritis in 10 years. Once that happens there is no way to undo it.
Top 8 Whiplash Injury Symptoms
As I’ve noted the symptoms from whiplash can show up within minutes to hours but it is not unusual for them to take days and even weeks to manifest.
Top Symptom #1: Neck Pain and Stiffness: this is to be expected. The violent whipping of the neck can tear the delicate soft tissues of the neck – muscles, ligaments, joint capsules, tendons. These injuries will cause swelling and muscle spasm in the neck and shoulders.
Top Symptom #2: Increased Pain with Neck Movement: with swelling and tissue damage the pain is aggravated when you stretch those tissues. The big mistake both doctors and those injured make is to keep the neck from moving. This only delays healing.
Top Symptom #3: Loss of Motion in the Neck: Pain, spasm, swelling, and nerve irritation all result in a reduction of mobility of the neck. When you move it hurts and there is also a natural tendency to limit motion.
Top Symptom #4: Headaches Most Commonly Starting at the Base of the Skull: when the 11 lb head is whipped back and forth on the delicate structures of the neck it often injures the very small muscles at the base of the skull and irritates the Suboccipital Nerves that travel up into the head, causing headaches.
Top Symptom #5: Pain and Soreness in the Shoulders, Upper Back and Arms: many of the muscles in the neck are attached to the shoulders or upper back and whiplash injury is often experienced there. The nerves from the mid and lower neck travel into the arms and can cause pain in the arms.
Top Symptom #6: Tingling or Numbness in the Arms: the nerves that control both sensation and muscle action in the arms come from the neck. When these nerves are violently stretched or pinched in whiplash they often cause numbness or tingling.
Top Symptom #7: Fatigue: with whiplash the brain gets whipped back and forth and strikes the inside of the skull. The brainstem in the upper neck is also stretched and compressed. This neurological trauma can leave you fatigued for weeks and even months.
Top Symptom #8: Dizziness: injury to the upper neck will disrupt the nerves that control balance and cause dizziness. The whiplash can also cause an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system in the upper neck.
Those are the top 8 most common whiplash symptoms. Many people also experience additional symptoms such as:
- Blurred vision
- Ringing in the ears (tinnitus)
- Sleep disturbance
- Irritability
- Difficulty concentrating
- Memory problems
- Depression
Why Whiplash Injuries Cause Permanent Damage
While many medical doctors make the mistake of assuming whiplash injuries and their symptoms will heal fully with no complications, that is wrong and a dangerous path to take. By the time you are experiencing chronic recurrent symptoms from a whiplash injury 6 months or a year later it is much more difficult to avoid permanent damage. The soft tissues have largely healed.
Let’s look a bit at what happens and why permanent damage with whiplash injuries is so common.
The average head weighs about 11 pounds. Even sitting still if you bend your head forward so your ear is only an inch in front of your shoulder it effectively adds another 11 lbs to the weight your neck is trying to hold up.
When the neck is whipped back and forth violently, even in a low speed collision it can cause damage to many tissues in the neck, shoulders, and upper back:
- The larger muscles that run from the shoulders into the base of the skull
- The very small and delicate muscles in the upper neck
- The joint capsules of the small neck joints
- The suboccipital nerves in the upper neck
- The nerves in the mid and lower neck that travel into the arms
- The brain
- The discs between the cervical vertebrae
- The vertebrae
All soft tissues heal by the fibrosis of healing. There are 3 stages of healing and if the appropriate treatment is not given at each stage the result is permanent damage.
- Acute Inflammatory Phase
- Repair Phase
- Remodeling Phase
The repair phase involves the body replacing damaged tissue with scar tissue. This is where the long term problems and damage start.
Scar tissue is NOT HEALTHY tissue!
It is WEAKER and less LESS ELASTIC than healthy uninjured tissue.
If proper treatment is not given or if it is delayed then you miss the benefits of the Remodeling Phase. This is where proper movement and stress helps the body make the scar tissue as close to uninjured tissue as possible.
Proper treatment during the inflammatory phase, repair phase, and remodeling phase ensures the injured tissue heals in a way that it functions as close to healthy, uninjured soft tissue as is possible.
Don’t Delay Whiplash Injury Treatment
The delay or absence of the appropriate treatment of Whiplash Injuries results in the development of scar tissue that never has the chance to remodel into more healthy and functional tissue.
This causes a potential range of permanent complications and damage such as:
- Joint Capsules with scar tissue resulting in loss of motion and pain.
- Cervical Spine Muscles with scar tissue that causes chronic tightness and spasm and limits their ability to move the neck.
- Scar tissue around the Cervical Nerve Roots: these are the nerves that travel into the arms and can result in numbness, tingling, and weakness.
- Scar tissue in the Upper Cervical Spine causes tension and pressure to the suboccipital nerves resulting in headaches and causing tension to the brainstem resulting in a range of symptoms from sleep issues to fatigue to anxiety.
- All of these complications to the joints and muscles causing a loss of motion and imbalance in the neck result in the development of degenerative arthritis that comes with its own set of long term complications and symptoms.
If you’ve been in a whiplash injury it is never too late to get proper treatment. Even if it has been years, the right care can greatly reduce your symptoms and slow down the degenerative process. The best time to start care is now.
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