Neck Injury Pain After an Accident: What it Could Mean
Transcript
Hi, I’m Mike Hancock. A lot of our clients come to us after being involved in a car accident and they are experiencing neck pain and they are wondering what that could mean. Well, I can tell you that after spending 30 years putting doctors on the witness stand, cross-examining defense doctors, talking with and reviewing medical records from neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons, neurologists, pain management specialists, chiropractors, that the most common way person is going to injure their neck in a car accident, in layman’s terms, is through a whiplash-type of injury.
A whiplash injury is simply when your neck or body part moves beyond where it is supposed to move and stretches, tears, the muscles, tendons, ligaments in and around your neck. You can also what’s called a bulging or herniated or protruding disc and these discs are kind of the shock absorbers between your vertebrae that could push in your spinal column and sometimes when the whiplash is hard enough, it can cause those discs to tear and press on certain nerves that are coming out of your spine.
You may have heard of this over the years, in layman’s terms, as a pinched nerve. And so you can have a pinched nerve in your neck, and really what that means is that your disc has herniated out or protruded out and is pressing on a certain nerve or spinal cord causing you to have symptoms such as headaches, neck pain, numbness, tingling or pain sensations going down from your neck to your arms and hands. Those are the most common type of injuries we see after a car accident. They can be treated by a number of different physicians, including chiropractic physicians, orthopedic physicians, neurologists, neurosurgeons, and pain management doctors. The gold standard is typically to refer you out for an MRI, to get a better idea of what is causing those types of symptoms in your neck.
If you have any more questions regarding symptoms after a car accident, you can visit other parts of our website, lawhancock.com, or just give me a call at the office. Take Care.