Mesa Auto Accident Injury Chiropractic & Physical Therapy
Chiropractic care, Medical care, & Physical Therapy all at one location.
Chiropractic Care for Car Accident Victims in Mesa & Tempe
Nearly 200,000 Americans are hospitalized every year for injuries sustained in car crashes, and over 2.5 million individuals go to the emergency room as a result, according to the CDC.
If you’re injured in an accident and have to go to the ER, you can expect to pay approximately $3,300. If you’re hospitalized due to your injuries, you can expect your stay to cost an average of $57,000.
In the event that you are injured due to a car crash, there’s potential for more physical harm to be done if you’re not treated properly. It’s crucial that you work with an experienced medical team and doctors to prevent injuries from getting worse or becoming chronic.
See for yourself how Dr. Scott Taylor and the entire Southwest Spine & Rehab team diligently works to cure you of your pain, address the cause of it, and keep you living pain-free.
10 Most Common Car Accident Injuries We Treat
For many patients, after being in a car accident, they’re not always fully aware of the extent of their injury. With this in mind, our medical staff works to determine the source of your suffering and treat you in accordance using the most effective methods.
The following is a list of the most prevalent types of car accident personal injuries that our patients are seen for.
Whiplash (Neck)
Whiplash is a kind of neck injury. It’s caused by your neck bending forward and then backward in rapid succession, or vice versa. According to Rush System, over two million people suffer from whiplash every year.
Symptoms:
Soreness in the neck often happens immediately after the injury. While other times, pain from whiplash may take many days to occur after an accident.
In addition to discomfort in the neck, additional symptoms may include:
- Pain in the neck, shoulder, or back
- Stiffness in the neck
- Damage to the muscles and ligaments (myofascial injuries)
- Headaches
- Dizziness
- Strange sensations (paresthesias) such as burning or prickling
In addition, some patients have cognitive, somatic, or psychological disorders such as memory loss, impaired attention, nervousness/irritability, sleep difficulties, exhaustion, or depression.
Others may have somatic conditions, such as headaches or stomachaches.
Treatment:
Patients diagnosed with whiplash typically get treatment in the form of analgesics, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicines (NSAIDs), antidepressants, muscle relaxants, and a cervical collar that’s usually worn for two to four weeks.
Exercises targeting a wide range of motion, physical therapy, and traction of the cervical spine are also common treatment regimens.
The use of supplemental heat is effective at easing the tension in your muscles and reducing pain.
Spinal Cord
Damage to the small network of nerves and cells that transmits and receives messages from the brain to the rest of the body is known as a spinal cord injury (SCI). SpinalCord.com reports that accidents involving motor vehicles are the root cause of more than one third of the 12,500 spinal cord injuries that occur annually in the United States.
Symptoms:
It could feel as if every part of your life has been impacted if your spinal cord is suddenly damaged. Your injuries may have psychological, emotional, and social repercussions, which is why the right treatment is vital.
Here are the most common signs of SCI:
- Pressure in your neck, head, or back, or severe back discomfort.
- A feeling of weakness, clumsiness, or paralysis throughout your body.
- Your hands, fingers, feet, or toes may become numb, tingly, or lose their feeling.
- A lack of bowel or bladder control.
- Difficulty walking and maintaining balance.
Treatment:
By realigning the vertebrae in the spinal column, chiropractic treatment is frequently applied to aid in the acceleration of recovery in cases of moderate spinal cord injuries – cervical and back.
This approach helps to alleviate pressure that is being placed on the spinal cord, which in turn improves blood flow, which lessens pain, and supports recovery.
Upper & Lower Back
If the motion of your body is suddenly stopped by an airbag, steering wheel, windshield, or seat belt in a major collision, you could very easily suffer back pain.
Numerous bodily components, particularly those affecting your neck, spinal cord, and back, are injured in bad accidents, commonly leading to fractures and severe sprains. Even low-speed impacts are known to limit a patient’s mobility.
Disc damage is also common in high-speed crashes. Due to the sudden, jerky movement of these types of accidents, herniated discs often result. A herniated disc is also known as a slipped, bulging, or ruptured disc by medical professionals.
Symptoms:
When your back hurts, you typically know. However, some types of injuries to the back manifest pain in different parts of your body.
Here’s how to know if an accident has done damage to your back:
- Growing pain or discomfort when bending down and lifting semi-heavy items.
- Pain that gets worse when standing, sitting, or laying down.
- Back pain or discomfort that is intermittent.
- Stiffness when awakening in the morning, but the pain diminishes with exercise.
- Back pain that spreads to your hip(s), leg(s), or butt.
Treatment:
In most cases, home remedies for back pain start to take effect after a month or so.
Everyone’s body is different, though, and for many back pain is a complicated problem that requires physical therapy and chiropractic care.
People who’ve been in serious accidents often complain about having continuous, severe pain lasting for several months after the incident.
For back injuries in minor accidents, you might only require heat and over-the-counter painkillers.
A physical therapist will focus rehab on doing simple exercises, like walking, stretching, and light-lifting. We typically see back pain patient improvements within four to eight weeks of biweekly sessions.
Upon arrival at Southwest Spine & Rehab, a specialist in back-related injuries conducts a full assessment of your injury and bodily condition, then recommends the best course of treatment.
Internal Injury
Internal bleeding caused by trauma occurs in the vast majority of serious car crashes. After a less severe crash, internal bleeding might not make itself known for a few days. The organs most often damaged in auto accidents are the liver and kidneys, although any organ struck in a collision might result in internal bleeding.
Symptoms:
Symptoms begin to occur and steadily worsen as the bleeding continues.
The following are a few signs of internal bleeding:
- Abdominal pain or discomfort
- Constantly feeling chilly
- Being lightheaded
- Pale complexion
- Feeling thirsty
- Feeling fatigue
In addition, it’s common for victims of an accident to be treated for brain bleeding, broken or badly bruised ribs, pneumothorax, abdominal aorta aneurysm, and ruptured spleen.
The type of accident, such as the speed involved, the angle your body was forced into, plus many other factors, and the affected body part often determines the symptoms.
For instance:
- Internal bleeding from injuries in the liver or spleen can result in abdominal pain and/or edema. With time, the bleeding is known to worsen these symptoms.
- Once enough blood has been lost, internal bleeding from any source can cause light-headedness, dizziness, or fainting.
- Bleeding into the skin and soft tissues can cause a big patch of intensely purple skin, or ecchymosis.
- Internal bleeding in the thigh can cause swelling, constriction, and pain in the leg. This is typically brought on by a thighbone fracture.
- Internal bleeding in the brain may cause headaches, seizures, and loss of consciousness.
Treatment:
To improve circulation to the injured area and reduce unpleasant inflammation, your physical therapist may employ manual massage, heat, and ice treatments. To penetrate your tissues more thoroughly, the physician might employ therapeutic ultrasound and electrical stimulation.
PTs aid in speeding up your recuperation by boosting the flow of blood and lymph to your affected area.
Your physical therapist works with you to find ways to move your body that strengthens the muscles, tendons, and ligaments around the injury, which improves blood flow to the area.
Stretching exercises, which can be done at home, are part of the process of regaining mobility and range of motion.
Fractures & Broken Bones
Fractures and broken bones are two common types of injuries sustained in car accidents, both of which are treated often in our clinics. Here are the most common body parts that experience fractures and bone breaks from cars crashing:
1. Arm
A person may attempt to brace oneself for a collision by naturally extending their arms in front of them. Any bones in the arm that move as a result of the collision run the risk of breaking.
2. Wrist
Numerous delicate bones that make up your wrist are extremely breakable. This frequently happens while bracing or when the wrist gets stuck in the wrong spot and is somehow crushed.
3. Tibia or Fibula
When a section of the automobile collapses in and the legs become trapped between the floor and the dashboard, they are more vulnerable to harm. The severity of these fractures can vary depending on the force applied to the leg, but they can be treated with casts and, in some cases, surgery or physical therapy.
4. Femur
Even though the femur, or thigh bone, is one of the body’s strongest bones, it nonetheless frequently fractures in auto accidents. This might happen as a result of the car collapsing or from preparing for impact.
5. Clavicle
Your clavicle, also referred to as the collarbone, is a delicate bone that is readily shattered. On many people, the seatbelt is also close to the clavicle, which might contribute to pressure that causes breaks.
Physical therapy will play a significant role in the healing process and the arm may be placed in a cast to prevent mobility.
6. Rib(s)
Both the impact of airbags and the use of seatbelts might result in rib fractures. Ribs cannot be placed in a cast, unlike clavicles, so care must be used when moving them while the bones are healing.
7. Spine
Disc fractures are frequently brought on by the thrashing of a person in head-on and rear-end collisions. When a CD is compressed individually, this happens.
With rest, a back brace, and physical therapy, the majority of these fractures can be healed.
8. Hip
Our capacity to move depends on the hip, which joins the thigh bone to the pelvic. Hip fractures occur frequently, too, through falls, automobile accidents, and other incidents.
Due to the hip’s intricacy, recovery may necessitate the use of screws, plates, and rods in order to support the area and restore complete mobility.
9. Pelvis
Although it can happen in a car collision, a motorbike accident actually causes this injury more frequently. In order to fully heal after a pelvic fracture, bed rest, physical therapy, and maybe crutches are necessary.
10. Skull or Face
The most frequent reason for this injury is someone not using a seatbelt, which causes their head to hit the windshield when the vehicle crashes.
With time and pain medication, many of these fractures may heal on their own, but severe skull fractures can result in problems or even brain damage.
Symptoms:
- Limb or joint that is out of place
- Swelling, bruising, or bleeding
- Intense or unbearable pain
- Numbness and tingling
- Bone protruding through skin
- Inability to move a limb or bear weight on it
Treatment:
A fracture is treated differently depending on the sort of fracture it is, what caused it, and how badly your bones are affected.
As you recover from and mend from a bone fracture, chiropractic therapy and PT can be beneficial. In order to assist patients regain and maintain their ideal bone strength, our chiropractors assess each patient’s bone density, perform tests to determine it, and develop a personalized plan.
In order to assist our patients heal more quickly and strengthen their bones and muscles, we frequently use manipulation treatments, sometimes known as adjustments, rehabilitation, relaxation techniques, and nutritional and dietary supplement guidance.
Knees
A victim of an automobile accident may sustain a variety of knee injuries, ranging from minor cuts and burns to serious ligament and soft tissue damage. Soft tissue injuries can vary in complexity, making some necessitate long-term care.
Here are the typical knee injuries sustained due to car accidents:
1. Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL)
If you tear your ACL, there might be a loud popping noise, but certainly a great deal of knee pain.
2. Posterior Cruciate Ligament (PCL)
This type of injury, often known as a “dashboard knee,” happens when the driver or a passenger strikes the car’s dashboard. Pain and edema are typical signs.
The ligament securing the tibia (shinbone) to the femur is injured (thighbone).
3. Medial Collateral Ligament (MCL)
An MCL injury also happens in an accident when the knee strikes a hard object inside the car. The tibia and femur are also joined by the MCL.
4. Meniscus
Injuries to the meniscus harm the discs that assist keep the knee bones from rubbing against one another. While walking, these discs stabilize and cushion the knee.
Swelling, intense discomfort, instability, and knee locking are typical signs of this injury.
Symptoms:
- Stiffness and swelling
- Warm to the touch and redness
- Instability or can’t bear weight
- Pop or crunch noise when injured
- Knee cannot be fully straightened
Treatment:
There are nonsurgical options that ought to be explored as initial treatment for knee injuries sustained in an accident.
In addition to minimizing grinding and clicking sensations in the knee, chiropractic adjustments can provide significant pain relief. These procedures successfully increase mobility and can support patients in getting back to their regular routines.
Chiropractors can correct the alignment of the joints in individuals with osteoarthritis, which reduces inflammation, fosters mobility and flexibility, and enhances gait.
Additionally, you can receive total-body treatment that takes into account your condition’s effects on the surroundings and your food.
Feet & Ankles
Compartment syndrome, Lisfranc or middle foot fractures, and heel bone fractures are a few of the most frequent foot issues due to a vehicle collision.
Here’s how these conditions happen:
1. Compartment Syndrome
Numerous tiny compartments of tendons, muscles, and nerves make up the structure of your foot. A crushed, punctured, fractured, or broken foot compartment results in pressure and bleeding.
When you have compartment syndrome, your foot swells as the nerves and muscles are compressed.
Car accident compartment syndrome injuries are excruciatingly painful and it’s possible that your foot won’t fully recover if it’s not treated.
2. Midfoot or Lisfranc
Any damage to the middle of your foot that goes untreated can result in arthritis, chronic pain, and reduced mobility.
It may take several months for this injury, also known as a Lisfranc fracture, to recover completely.
Most likely, your doctor may advise you to avoid standing while you heal. In order to fix broken or dislocated foot bones, surgery may be required, but is always a last resort.
3. Calcaneus
The heel bone may be broken, crushed, or fractured due to the high impact force in an auto collision.
Heel bone fractures, also referred to as calcaneus injuries, can severely impair one’s ability to walk. In severe cases, surgery is required to fuse the bones together.
Inadequate treatment for heel bone fractures can lead to persistent pain, arthritis, and permanent deformity.
Severe Foot Injuries
A car accident’s force of impact can result in a variety of acute foot injuries, in addition to those listed above. Loose objects that can hit, pierce, or crush toes.
Acute foot and ankle car accident injuries include:
- Punctures
- Ligament tears
- Severe bruising
- Shattered, dislocated, crushed, or broken bones
- Ripped tendons
- Sprains and strains
Symptoms:
- Pain when putting weight on the injured foot
- Sensitivity to touch
- Swelling
- Bruising
- Minimal range of motion
- Foot/ankle is unstable when standing or walking
- Popping sound at the time of the accident
Treatment:
Regular chiropractic care can assist with flexibility and help the foot and ankle move more freely, while strengthening the ankle and enhancing its stability.
Damage to soft tissue and nerve damage is common and massage therapy can help ease pain associated with these injuries.
Regular chiropractic adjustments help blood flow, which accelerates recovery and lowers the risk of long-term damage.
Shoulders
The clavicle or humerus can easily fracture in a bad car collision. Furthermore, shoulder movement can be significantly restricted by a shattered clavicle, or collarbone. When the humerus is fractured, the shoulder becomes exceedingly swollen, has a limited range of motion, and is quite painful.
The muscles and tendons that make up the rotator cuff hold the upper arm bone in the shoulder socket. If the rotator cuff is injured, the patient may feel a dull aching, have trouble moving the arm, and experience arm weakness if any of these muscles or tendons are damaged.
Symptoms:
- Discomfort and pain when raising or lowering an arm
- Weak feeling
- Reduction or limitation in motion
- Locking, popping, or grinding noise
- Instability
- Tingly or numb
- Swelling
- Rigidity
Treatment:
Here are the most common treatments for shoulder injuries:
Articulatory treatment aims to increase a joint’s range of motion, in this case, the shoulder joint. Your chiropractor will move the joint through its current range of motion while applying force during your session to gradually widen it and enhance shoulder mobility.
Myofascial release focuses on the shoulder’s tight connective tissues. These could be causing or exacerbating frozen shoulder and other painful conditions that limit the range of motion in your shoulder.
Cervical spinal manipulation treats shoulder pain from the cervical spine and can lessen pain from pinched nerves. Cervical spinal manipulation focuses on aligning the cervical vertebrae.
Functional technique works on range of motion and stiffness of the shoulder joint. This light pressure applied over time relaxes the joint and reduces pain from motion.
Wrists & Hands
Your hands and wrists can sustain injuries in a car collision in a variety of ways. For instance, you might brace your hands against the side or top of your automobile in the moments before the crash or even while it is happening. The bones, tendons, and ligaments in your hands and wrists are under a lot of force as a result.
Some accident victims raise their hands during the collision, which might result in their hands or wrists colliding with the airbag, dashboard, window, steering wheel, or other interior car pieces.
Here are three very common hand and wrist injuries from cars crashing:
1. Fractures
A hand fracture might refer to the bones in your palm or a broken finger. One or both hands could be crushed in a catastrophic auto collision.
2. Ligament Tear
Hand sprains, which happen when the ligaments linking the bones in your hands are stretched beyond their usual range of motion or even ripped, are one type of ruptured ligament in your hand.
If left untreated, ligament injuries can lead to complications and prevent your wounded hand from healing properly.
You run the danger of experiencing ongoing pain and discomfort when using that hand if a hand injury does not heal properly.
3. Joint Dislocation
The middle knuckle of every one of your fingers is where dislocations in the hand most frequently occur.
Your hands and wrists move thanks to its joints, and if a joint is injured, you can notice a reduction in your hand’s overall range of motion.
An untreated dislocated hand or wrist joint can cause irreversible harm and make it difficult to do routine everyday duties.
Symptoms:
- Extreme pain
- Swelling
- Numbness
- Coldness or grayness
- Finger or hand bending that’s not normal
- When you move your finger, hand, or wrist there’s a clicking, grinding, or popping
Treatment:
Our chiropractors often use stretching techniques in addition to manipulating the bones in order to assist lessen pain and reduce the stiffness in inflamed ligaments. This helps release tension in the wrist, which in turn helps reduce the tightness in the ligaments.
Some examples of these types of exercises include gripping one’s hand, rotating one’s wrist, flexing one’s wrist, and bending one’s fingers.
Traumatic Brain Injury
One of the most serious and life-altering injuries that a person can sustain in a car accident is a traumatic brain injury (TBI). There are at least 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) that occur each year, either as a standalone injury or in conjunction with other injuries, according to the CDC.
After falls, the major cause of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), which account for slightly over 35 percent of all cases, car accidents are the second greatest cause, accounting for 17.3 percent of all TBIs each year. Traumatic brain injuries are typically brought on by a forceful hit or jolt to the head or body, which is something that occurs very frequently in the event of a car collision.
Symptoms:
- Going unconscious
- Headache that doesn’t go away or becomes worse
- Nausea or vomiting
- Seizures or convulsions
- Enlargement of eye pupil(s)
- Liquids flowing from the ears or nose
- When sleeping, not being able to wake up
Treatment:
During treatment for traumatic brain injury, the physician will strive to restore neuroplasticity to the portions of the patient’s brain that were affected.
Exercise has a positive effect on the brain, just as it does on other muscles.
A chiropractic neurologist is someone who has been trained to activate the neurological system through the use of non-invasive means such as light, sound, joint manipulation,
5 Car Accident Injury FAQs
Do you have questions regarding an injury that you sustained as a result of a car accident? See if your question has been answered below. If your answer isn’t provided, reach out to our team today!
Both your body and the vehicle have kinetic energy when you are traveling down. When you wish to stop and apply the brakes, the energy is transferred as heat into the brakes, allowing you to stop quickly. But when a quick, unexpected automobile crash occurs, your body absorbs that energy, which often causes pain and injury.
When you are in a bad accident, your body is jolted around forcefully, which results in a variety of injuries. Injuries such as fractured bones, burns, head and neck trauma, brain injuries, back and spinal cord trauma, and spinal cord injuries are among the most prevalent types of injuries.
It’s possible that you’ll experience feelings of guilt, anxiety, wrath, or astonishment. The experience of each of these feelings is natural and to be expected, regardless of whether or not you were at blame for the accident.
It’s also possible that as soon as it happened, you instantly started replaying it in your thoughts, trying to figure out what took place and where things went wrong. This makes perfect logic, but in order to handle the issue, you need to keep a level head.
After being in a car accident, the majority of people just think about their bodily wounds. In order for them to recover from the injuries they sustained in the accident, they might require diagnostic tests, surgery, and physical therapy. The process of getting better could take a few weeks or even months.
Even if you’ve only been in a minor fender bender, you can often be left with aches and pains. The best methods for treating minor pain are massage therapy, physical therapy, stretching, exercise, and rest. Consult with your doctor for the best course of action for your injury.
Pain, symptoms, and injuries sustained in a car accident might reveal themselves hours, days, or even weeks after the collision. During a traumatic incident such as a car accident, our bodies go through a period in which they experience a massive surge of adrenaline and endorphins. This is one of the most prevalent reasons for delayed symptoms.
Treat Your Pain Effectively Today!
After being in a vehicle accident, you shouldn’t have to live in constant discomfort, and our staff is here to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. Allow our trained medical professionals to assist you in locating the source of your discomfort, determine the reason for it, and provide a treatment plan that does not involve intrusive procedures.
Contact Southwest Spine & Rehab right away for a free consultation.
We have locations in Mesa and Tempe and are looking forward to helping alleviate your pain!
