5 Benefits of Chiropractic Care for Auto Accident Injuries
Auto accidents: the stuff of irritation, headaches, sadness, and excruciating pain. Even a seemingly minor fender-bender can cause years of needless suffering from car accident injuries like whiplash. And when I say needless, I really mean it. From personal experience, I know just how agonizing it can be to deal with auto accident injuries for months and even years on end. In fact, a 1994 car accident caused me awful headaches for two and a half years! Finally, getting chiropractic care for auto accident injuries I experienced years earlier is what convinced me that I wanted to become a chiropractor. I wanted to be able to provide other people with the same welcome pain relief I had experienced myself. I’ve been providing chiropractic care in Knoxville for 20 years now, and I’ve loved every minute of helping people truly recover and get back to living the lives they want to live. Here are just some of the ways chiropractic care can help after an auto accident:
1. Chiropractic Care Reduces Inflammation in the Body
The traumas your body receives during a car accident, even if they seem minor or non-existent at the time, will inevitably cause inflammation that can turn into a lot of pain. For example, if you experience whiplash (the most common auto accident injury), even a mild case will cause tiny tears in muscles, ligaments, and tendons in your neck. Any other part of the body that received trauma, even if it didn’t lead to broken bones or open wounds, can experience similar soft tissue injuries, none of which will show up in an emergency room x-ray.
This is one of the reasons people struggle for so long after even minor car accidents. The pain may not even manifest the same day or hour as the accident, which can confuse the whole healing process too. The body will normally cause inflammation to rush blood and resources to these areas for healing. But without proper supportive care, the inflammation can lead to long-term swelling, stiffness, and pain from overcompensating movements that you make to avoid more pain. It can be a vicious cycle that lasts for a long time, causing a decline in your quality of life.
Chiropractic care for auto accident injuries helps to support your healing naturally, without painkillers, by helping the body resolve the inflammation more quickly. Spinal adjustments help your nervous system direct anti-inflammatory resources to injured tissues, which helps resolve the pain and injury much more effectively.
2. Chiropractic Care Restores Mobility
One of the big problems with unresolved inflammation in the body after a car accident injury is that it stymies your range of motion and can cause even normal, everyday movements to be painful. Those of you who have experienced whiplash know the classic symptoms of a stiff, painful neck and headaches. It can be hard to turn your head from side to side or to be able to look up and down normally using your neck. If your back or other areas of the body are injured, the same thing can happen. Auto accident back pain can make it hard to sit, stand, turn, lie down, walk, etc. When the inflammation becomes chronic, it can prevent optimal blood flow from bringing nutrients to help heal those areas, which slows your healing process further.
Here at Homberg Chiropractic & Wellness, we have a range of options to help you heal faster so that you can move without pain again. Chiropractic spinal adjustments restore correct spinal posture to unpinch nerves. This empowers your nervous system to send healing resources where they need to go, and tells the body’s own healing systems to kick it up a notch. In addition, soft tissue injuries can heal faster with the help of laser therapy, which also reduces inflammation and stimulates cellular healing processes that help accelerate muscle, tendon, and ligament repair. Taken together, these therapies provide excellent drug-free pain relief that helps you recover faster and on a long-term basis.
3. Chiropractic Care Reduces the Need for Medication
I don’t need to tell you what reliance on painkillers does to people. Not only can it be expensive and lead to long-term, unwanted side effects, but it can also damage lives when it comes to higher-powered painkillers. Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen how good people who hoped to recover from a painful injury became addicted to painkillers. But what if there was a way to experience long-term pain relief naturally, thanks to your own body’s ability to heal itself? With chiropractic care, that’s exactly what you get.
The problem with painkillers, on a basic level, is that they only cover up the pain. They don’t actually fix the underlying problems that cause the pain. As a Knoxville chiropractor, I’ve seen patients who have spent years taking painkillers day in, day out, without lasting relief. I’ve been able to help them get real relief by providing spinal adjustments and supportive care that helps them really heal from the damage of the car accident, even if that accident happened years earlier (as in my case).
Because chiropractic care treats the root causes of pain by relieving pinched nerves and allowing the nervous system to do its job properly, it eliminates the pain from its very root, which then eliminates the need for addictive medications that do more harm than good. Chiropractic care for auto accident injuries helps you truly recover and get back to a productive, vibrant life.
4. Chiropractic Care Prevents Further Back Pain after an Auto Accident
Auto accident back pain and neck pain can recur for years if not properly treated. Not only can prompt post-accident chiropractic care alleviate pain initially caused by the accident, but it can actually prevent years of back pain or neck pain down the road. I’ve worked with many patients who were in minor car accidents where this was the case. The car accident seemed minor, but actually caused subluxations (vertebral misalignments) in the spine that may not have caused pain at the time, but continued to worsen, gradually causing more and more pain and dysfunction over weeks, months and years. But getting prompt chiropractic care and diagnosis as soon as possible after an auto accident can help you get on the road to recovery faster while preventing those slow-burn injuries from causing you back pain later. Chiropractic care is just as much about preventing future pain as it is about relieving current pain!
5. Chiropractic Care Reduces Scar Tissue
Scar tissue can build up as an injury heals, particularly if not given proper care. As scar tissue develops, it stifles normal range of motion and causes painful knots of tissue that can cause discomfort and compensation in movement that can throw you off balance in the future. This causes stiffness, discomfort, and pain. Again, if this sounds familiar, chiropractic care can help by breaking down scar tissue or preventing it from building up in the first place so that the injury can heal properly. A combination of chiropractic care and laser therapy works very well for this purpose.
The Knoxville Chiropractor to See After an Auto Accident
If you have been in a car accident recently, or suspect that the pain you’re experiencing now could have come from a car accident in the past, there is drug-free pain relief and hope for real recovery through chiropractic care at Homberg Chiropractic & Wellness in Knoxville. Schedule an appointment with us today!