If you get a whiplash in a car wreck you can get symptoms such as pain headaches
dizziness etc but I'm gonna tell you the real reason that you need to be
concerned stay tuned I am Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life
and if you'd like to truly master health by understanding how the body really
works make sure that you subscribe and hit
that notification bell so that you don't miss anything people in a car accident
they're often told that they get a whiplash and they they have neck pain
and the whiplash caused that but what is it so let's talk about the mechanics in
a car accident a little bit so you're sitting at a traffic light for example
and someone hits you from the back so what that means is that your body is
still but the car gets pushed out from under you so your body moves forward and
your head is sitting still and your head your brain perceives that as the body is
leaving and the head is getting left behind and the brain says this can't be
good and the head weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of a bowling ball and
it's suspended on this flimsy little neck by muscles so when the head gets
left behind the brain is gonna try to keep up with the body so it starts
contracting the muscles on the front but because the head is so heavy and this
impact is so sudden there's no way that these muscles can keep up with that
tremendous force so what happens then is the muscles get micro-tears you start
tearing little fibers within the muscle and then if you have a headrest that's
properly positioned meaning kind of high up hopefully then
the headrest will catch the head and you're not going to get an excessive
extension of the head because that could be really damaging so make sure that you
have your headrest in a proper high position
but then the head bounces on the headrest and then it starts going
forward so first the head was moving back then it bounces and now it starts
moving forward and now the same procedure happens again but in Reverse
so the muscles on the back of the neck contract to try to keep the head from
falling off the shoulders going forward so first you get some little micro tears
in the front and then you get little micro tears in the back and these tears
they're sort of like a really hard workout if you've ever had one of those
you know that you feel a little stiff the first day you feel really stiff on
the second day and then it culminates the worst stiffness the soreness is
somewhere between 48 to 72 hours so that's why when you've been in a car
accidents that's where the stiffness and inflammation is the worst either of
those things is not a terribly big deal because your body can fix that your body
can heal micro-tears it can get rid of the inflammation and so forth but here's
why we need to be concerned first we need to talk about how does the body
normally work how does the brain and normally control the body well we have
something called proprioception that's feedback so the brain controls the body
but the brain needs information from the body so if you move your hand then it's
the brain sending the signals but the hand has to tell the brain exactly
what's going on so that the brain can manage that precisely if the brain gets
accurate information accurate feedback the brain can do a precise job of
controlling it same thing happens with the muscles in the neck but
in a whiplash you have trauma you have impact you have inflammation you have
micro tears so you get really really stiff and for a few days or even a
couple of weeks after you move really really stiff and things aren't moving so
well so it's the movement that normally provides the information that gives the
brain an accurate picture of what the world looks like and the combination of
the trauma from the whiplash and the stiffness that keeps you from moving
much means that you have a reduced amount of feedback to the brain and you
have distorted information so now the brain does not have a true or accurate
or sufficient picture of what the world looks like so after a couple of weeks
you may have less of a stiffness you may recovery may feel pretty good hey it
wasn't so bad I'm feeling 80% better but you've set yourself up for a vicious
cycle because that reduced information that inaccurate perception of the brain
can come back to haunt you years months and years later so a lot of people they
don't really have a problem with it for several years but then two years three
years five years down the road now they start having some issues and at that
point it's hard for most people to link it back to the car accident but once we
find people with arthritis or stiff neck poor curbs poor posture there's almost
always one or several whiplash accidents in several years prior to that so that
is why I strongly recommend that you would get some good quality chiropractic
care after you've had a car accident whether you have any pain or not there
has been a distortion those signals and it's in your best
interest to get that taken care of and if you get some chiropractic treatment
make sure that you don't just get enough to feel a little better make sure that
you get enough care that you restore all of those signals so that you have a
correct and true picture represented in the brain from all of that feedback so
that means all of the muscles the anterior scalenes the
sternocleidomastoid muscles the extensor muscles they should all be firing
perfectly which we can test through applied kinesiology you should have a
perfect range of motion you should restore the range of motion so when you
rotate your head and look to the side or when you tilt your head to the side or
when you bend it forwards or backwards all of those ranges of motions should be
restored and there should be no pain or stiffness associated with that that's
how you know that you have reset all those communication pathways and you're
not gonna get any issues with this years down the road so if you know someone who
has been in a car accident recently or even months of years before share this
information with them so that they can learn the consequences and how
everything functions and how chiropractic and even nutrition can be
very beneficial to resolve that those problems if you're new to this channel
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