Benefits of Chiropractic Care for Whiplash: A Comprehensive Guide

Are you considering seeking chiropractic care for whiplash? Whiplash most often occurs during car accidents. However, other types of activities can also cause whiplash, including playing contact sports, getting hit in the head by an object or person, experiencing a hard fall, or riding a particularly jarring roller coaster. Whiplash primarily causes neck pain, stiffness, headaches, and blurry vision. In severe cases, you may also feel the pain radiating into one or both of your shoulders. If you believe that you have a whiplash injury, our chiropractor in Kenosha can help with chiropractic adjustments, corrective exercises, and physiotherapy.

Understanding Chiropractic Care

Chiropractic care focuses on treating injuries and disorders of the spine and extremity joints through chiropractic adjustments and other holistic treatment options, like corrective exercises, physiotherapy, and nutrition advice. It is based on the belief that the body has the ability to heal itself and that proper alignment of the musculoskeletal system is essential for overall health and well-being.

Chiropractic Treatment for Whiplash

Whiplash can cause misalignments of the vertebrae, spinal joint dysfunction, nerve compression, and muscle strains. All of these underlying injuries can contribute to neck pain, stiffness, headaches, and blurry vision. Chiropractic care for whiplash centers around chiropractic adjustment, which is designed to restore joint function and alignment. Most often, these adjustments involve the use of the chiropractor’s hands, forearms, and elbows in order to deliver short, swift thrusts to the affected joint. This treatment helps reduce pain and inflammation while helping your body heal itself.

How Chiropractic Care Can Benefit Whiplash

If you have a whiplash injury from a car accident, playing contact sports, falling, or riding a particularly jarring roller coaster, chiropractic treatment for whiplash can help you by providing pain relief, improved range of motion of the vertebrae of the neck, reduced inflammation and improved rates of healing.

Pain Relief

Chiropractic care for whiplash helps alleviate pain by increasing blood flow to the injured area, restoring normal joint mobility, and alleviating the pressure on pinched or compressed nerves.

Improved Range of Motion

Whiplash can misalign the vertebrae of the neck. This can decrease the range of motion, making it difficult for you to fully turn your head to the left and/or right. Chiropractic adjustments for whiplash help increase the range of motion by ensuring the vertebrae are in their proper positions.

Reduced Inflammation

Inflammation is your body’s natural response to getting injured. It occurs when your body sends white blood cells and other substances to the injured area in order to heal it. As a result, the area can swell, turn red and feel warm. While this is your body’s way of healing injuries, it can also increase your levels of pain. Chiropractic care reduces inflammation by ensuring that the vertebrae in your neck are properly aligned, increasing blood flow to the injured area and alleviating joint restrictions.

Improved Overall Healing

When the vertebrae are misaligned, it can impede the body’s ability to communicate with itself via the central nervous system. This can slow down healing and increase the body’s stress levels. Correcting misalignments in the neck helps improve central nervous system communication, lowers stress, and improves joint function. When all of these benefits are combined, it can reduce the time it takes you to heal from an injury.

Who Can Benefit from Chiropractic Care for Whiplash

If you’ve recently been in a car accident or experienced a particularly jarring tackle while playing contact sports, you may want to consider getting evaluated by our chiropractor for whiplash. This is because it can take a day or two for the symptoms to fully develop. At first, you may only notice some neck stiffness, but as the injury progresses and your body attempts to heal itself, you may notice worsening pain, a loss of range of motion in the neck, and severe headaches. Some people even experience numbness or tingling in the arms, which can be caused by nerve compression. Getting evaluated and treated early can help reduce the number of symptoms you experience and help you heal faster.

If you are having symptoms of whiplash, you may want to consider scheduling an appointment at Jeranek Family Chiropractic in Kenosha, WI. Our chiropractor for whiplash can evaluate your neck to determine if you have any misalignments and/or soft tissue damage. If you do have whiplash, our chiropractor will develop a personalized treatment program to help reduce your pain and heal your injury.

To schedule an appointment, give us a call at 262-694-7833.