Have You Ever Been In An Accident?

Far too often I see in my office a
patient come in with neck pain, back
pain, headaches and I always ask them,
“Have you ever been in an accident?” And
most of the time they say no. We take
some X-rays and we find that they either
have a loss of the curvature in the neck
or a complete reversal of the curvature
in the neck. Now this only happens
through trauma, accidents, injuries, car
accidents, falls, sports injuries. And
what it does is it creates a a
dysfunction in the cervical spine. When
you have that normal curvature in your
neck, each bone and joint moves together
properly when you bend and twist and
turn your head. When you have that loss
of curvature or even a worse situation
where it’s reversed, those some of those
joints become fixated and they don’t
move the same as the ones either above
or below them. And this creates
problems. The longer they’re left uh not
functioning properly, the more
destruction occurs. bones start to
remodel, arthritis sets in. The space
between the bones where the disc is
becomes more and more narrow, which
creates more and more inflammation,
creates those bony changes that we
talked about, and can even irritate some
of the nerve tissue causing a whole host
of symptoms. So, it’s very important if
you’re in a car accident, no matter how
minor you think it is, maybe you just
stopped at a light and you get bumped
from behind, it’s important that you get
an X-ray of your neck to see if you’ve
lost that curvature because it can
create lots of problems that will go
unnoticed for a period of time. Your
body will adapt and it creates a bad
scenario long term for the healthier
spine.