The same reason that you fill a crack in a windshield as soon as it appears. To prevent things from getting worse. Neither you nor us here at Dixie Chiropractic want you to suffer from life-long pain, especially since it can be avoided with our treatments! Car accident injury prevention happens on the road, but once an accident occurs, many very serious injuries do not reveal themselves right away. Even minor accidents where damage to the automobile is minimal and you may think you feel fine can result in serious, long-term pain if you do not get treated right away.
At Dixie Chiropractic, we specialize in the treatment of auto injuries. We know that early treatment can minimize your recovery time and pain. We offer the latest therapies, treatments, and techniques. From laser and decompression to massage and ozone, our knowledge of neurology and physiology will help you get back on the road to good health as quickly as possible.
How soon should I get in to see a Chiropractor after an auto accident?
We recommend that you get an exam within 72 hours of your car accident to assess injuries and customize a treatment plan… Sooner is even better. Decision is the catalyst to progress! Your road to good health starts with making the decision to call us and set an appointment. More often than not, the earlier you obtain treatment, the faster you recover. Waiting too long has the risk of allowing your injuries to worsen before we can help. It also increases the chance that your insurance company won’t cover your treatment. Also, did you know that if you wait too long to seek medical attention, your insurance may not pay for your treatment? Remember that when dealing with insurance companies, it is important to have a doctor evaluate and document your injuries, and in the state of Utah, a minimum of $3000 worth of medical expenses is required for every auto insurance policy. It is called Personal Injury Protection or PIP, and it does not matter who was at fault in the accident. You are covered because your PIP will pay for your treatment. In addition, opening a PIP claim will not raise your premiums.
After a Car Accident Injury, what type of therapy should I ask for?
Leave that to us! At your first visit and assessment, we will create a treatment plan with you that will incorporate the treatments we offer, best tailored to you. Depending on the injuries you sustained, you will need different types of treatment. For example, if you are suffering from whiplash after being rear-ended, your treatment may include massage, mechanical traction, muscle stimulation, and ultrasound therapy. If you know of a treatment that has helped you in the past and that we offer as well, let us know and we would love to include that as well.
Part of the reason for the varying therapies that we use is due to the multitude of body regions that have the potential for injury in a car accident. While it’s true that the most common area injured in a car accident is a person’s neck, we see many shoulder injuries, usually manifesting as rotator cuff strains or tears, wrist injuries, low back, or knee injuries. The more violent the car accident or in other words the higher the speed of impact creating a greater G-Force of energy transmitted from the vehicle to the individual’s body typically means more stress and strain on the skeletal structure, joint connective tissues, and muscles of the body.
Sometimes when people are driving, but more common as a passenger, people may sit with their body rotated, legs crossed, or a foot up on the dashboard. I’ve even seen people on freeways driving a car with their left foot out the driver’s window while setting the car on cruise control. These positions may contribute to greater injury when coupled with a car crash. Usually, the more “out of position” the individual inside the vehicle may be, the more extensive the bodily injury. The most frequent adverse position that we encounter with car accident injuries is someone having their head rotated at the moment of impact. Sometimes they are simply looking at someone or something inside or outside of their vehicle, or they’re turning their head at the last moment as they see the accident coming and are wincing in an attempt to avoid the collision. The neck is especially vulnerable to greater injury when rotated at impact due to the connective tissues already being pre-stretched or contracted, as the case may be, which translates to greater strain than had the had been in a neutral position at the moment of impact.
What Therapies are offered at Dixie Chiropractic?
Since we have a multitude of varying therapies to help with injuries, I’d like to share a few of our less-known therapies that you may have never heard of yet. The reason for so many different types of therapies is the different tissues and structures of the body that are injured in a car accident. Most people, when they consider a car accident injury and think of the word “whiplash,” only think of ligament, tendon, and muscle strains that occur in the neck. The more serious or sinister types of injuries that we see are other structures that are often injured but go undetected because the examination process used did not enable the practitioner to discover some of these more hidden injuries. My orthopedic examination process is designed to screen for the worst injuries along with the more obvious ones. This is why my examination includes discovering intervertebral disc damage, joint capsule damage, bursitis or myofascial pain as well as the musculotendinous and ligament damages that typically occur.
Spinal Decompression: Here at Dixie Chiropractic, we specialize in using many different types of therapies to help eliminate many types of pains. One of these therapies is our Spinal Decompression Table. A padded table that’s built for comfort, this device uses a pulley system to carefully tug on the patient to allow their stressed and compressed spine to open up. Used to treat back and neck pain, spinal decompression is a type of motorized traction that gently stretches the spine – so gently that the patient often doesn’t feel a thing. In fact, most patients describe the procedure as relaxing. Decompression provides negative pressure on the disc allowing bulging or herniated disks to retract. This in turn takes the pressure off of the nerves in your spine and helps promote the flow of oxygen and nutrient-rich fluids into the injured disks so they can heal. Non-surgical spinal decompression is just one of our amazing tools.
Laser Therapy: We have found that combining spinal decompression with our new Class IV lasers helps injuries heal even faster. These lasers do not just mask the pain. They use specific wavelengths of light that penetrate more deeply than other lasers – deeply enough to speed the healing of injuries like whiplash and herniated discs. The light passes through the skin and into injured areas, where it makes contact with the regenerating cells. That contact promotes extramitochondrial activity within the cell. This increases the cell’s metabolism and increases the regenerative process. They are even safe to apply over metal implants, broken skin, and acute injuries. These lasers have been FDA-approved since 2003. They are safe and effective, and each laser treatment takes only a few minutes. The use of laser therapy enables us to help discs heal twice as quickly as decompression alone by stimulating adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production and enhancing cell membrane permeability.
Massage Therapy: We also offer massage therapy, and our massage therapists are specially trained to treat accident victims by improving their range of motion, relaxing muscles, improving flexibility, and managing pain. On top of this, massages have been known to relieve overall stress, lower blood pressure, and provide relief for neck and back pain. Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a massage, especially if they are achy and sore as the result of an injury?
Calmare: Famous for being completely painless with instant relief, Calmare therapy is used for treating many types of nerve pains and is one of our most popular therapies. An example of nerve pain that can be treated by Calmare therapy is neuropathy. Unfortunately, neuropathy is starting to become very common among Americans. Neuropathy can be caused by many different sources such as diabetes and physical traumas. These sources leave nerves damaged, injured, and malfunction! This results in pain and sometimes a numbness or tingling sensation around said nerves. Our Calmare therapy uses electrodes to send a signal from the damaged or malfunctioning nerves to the brain, which the brain reads as a message to stop sending pain to those nerves! The relief is instant, and through multiple uses, the control can be lifelong! There are many other uses for our Calmare therapy than just neuropathy- cancer pains and sciatic pain are just a couple of other examples.
There are many additional therapies that we perform at Dixie Chiropractic. Along with the few mentioned above, we have typical physical therapy modalities such as electrical muscle stimulation, ultrasound therapy, cryotherapy, heat, massage therapy, trigger point injections, prolozone, and of course chiropractic manipulation. We pride ourselves on having as many therapies as any other clinic in the area, and then some! With these many varying therapies and the amazing experience of our staff, we have a multitude of ways to help heal to the greatest extent and most effectively.
I was in a car accident recently and I feel fine. Is it still possible that I received an injury?
Yes. Many car accident victims, especially those who have been rear-ended, suffer from whiplash. Whiplash is a result of your neck bending forcibly forward and then backward or backward and then forward. Oftentimes the pain doesn’t settle in until a day or two after. Whiplash affects the tendons, muscles, discs, and nerves in the neck and can cause neck pain and stiffness, shoulder pain, dizziness, low back pain, numbness, blurred vision, irritability, difficulty sleeping, and other problems.
Fortunately, studies have shown that over 90% of whiplash patients see improvement when they receive chiropractic care. Whiplash is most effectively remedied with a variety of treatments based on each individual’s needs. At Dixie Chiropractic we have many different therapies, treatments, and techniques to help our patients recover from whiplash injuries as quickly as possible. These include ultrasound, electrical muscle stimulation, massage, chiropractic adjustments, laser therapy, ozone, and trigger point injections using homeopathic medicine.
Do I need to involve an attorney with my Insurance Claim?
When you have been injured in an accident, it is important to consult with an experienced attorney. We work with the best attorneys in our area who specialize in auto injury cases. We can recommend an attorney who will represent you and protect your interests. Remember that it is in the insurance company’s best interest to pay as little as possible. You will want an attorney who is experienced in representing auto accident victims and making sure that you receive reimbursement for the medical care you deserve as well as compensation for injuries.
Part of the reason for ensuring that your help from an experienced attorney is having one who understands the nature of the injuries that you have been diagnosed with. Some attorneys don’t understand the medical diagnosis and just like any professional you go to, everyone has their specialty. You would not want to use a corporate attorney for an injury case the same way you would not want to use the injury attorney for a corporate lawsuit. We work with attorneys who specialize in personal injury and car accidents thus ensuring that you have the best advocate on your side when settling your personal injury case.
It may seem odd that I am so focused on the legal matters that are involved in an car accident injury case, but I assure you it is with good reason. After many years in practice, I have seen great diversity in how well cases settle. Sometimes there is very little injury but the insurance company pays a large settlement, whereas, sometimes people have very serious injuries but the insurance company will dig in their heels and pay a very meager settlement or refuse to pay any settlement altogether. The settlement process ensues after a person has completed treatment and may hinge on many things. It is important to understand why this process is necessary. When you have been involved in a car accident, not only are you dealing with the injury and time that it takes to heal but the loss of ability to earn and work, ability to care for others if you are a parent, or any other loss that may manifest such as, canceling a trip that was planned, a family vacation, the ability to go to your child’s recital or sporting event, the ability to take chair of an infant or toddler, and the list goes on and on to the interruptions that an injury may bring. Therefore the process of “settlement” is to have some compensation for lost wages, property, or quality of life whether temporary or permanent because the injury may never heal. Therefore, I am a big fan of the settlement process primarily because after an accident injury I meet many people who are left suffering from headaches, neck pain, or some other ailment, for the rest of their life!
For a claims adjuster trying to decide on an appropriate financial amount to pay the claimant, many variables are taken into consideration. First of all, the claims adjuster is trying to determine whether or not you are actually injured in a car accident. If injured, to what extent. Typically, the greater the injury the greater the medical expense. However, this is not always the case. You can’t just look at medical expenses in order to determine how badly someone is injured. For instance, when someone breaks a bone, which typically is perceived by most people as a serious injury, a simple cast on the arm may be all the treatment they need. However, someone with a whiplash injury (which some do consider serious) may take months and months of care and thousands of dollars to fully heal. It is frustrating because many claims adjusters will say things such as, “it’s only a soft tissue injury.” This is very frustrating because the ‘soft tissues’ in the body, i.e. ligaments, tendons, and cartilage, are typically the hardest to heal and are left with the worst ongoing problems such as chronic myofascial pain, scar tissue lesions, or in overstretching called laxity which can be a long-term pain pattern even after things have fully healed.
Had a Car Accident Injury?… Do It Right.
Navigating the world of car accident injuries is not simple but it is certainly easier if you rely on the expertise of professionals such as ourselves. A simple checklist is all you need to get started. If you have been an accident:
- notify the police.
- exchange information with the other driver.
- seek treatment. We’ll help you with the rest!
While you’re waiting for the police to show up if an ambulance arrives and you feel pain or are having difficulty focusing, take a ride in the ambulance to the hospital and get checked there. Because of the adrenaline coursing through your system after a car accident, many times people walk away not even realizing they have been injured, and inevitably whatever pain they do feel worsens greatly overnight. In fact, many people feel worse the day after the accident than they do on the same day as the accident.
For any other questions or concerns, call us today and take charge of your health!