After an Accident: Why You Should Consult a Chiropractor

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' the host addresses the importance of consulting a chiropractor after experiencing an auto accident or any form of trauma. The discussion highlights how even minor accidents can cause long-term spinal issues and the role of a chiropractor in diagnosing and documenting these injuries. The host explains the procedures and evaluations performed by chiropractors, the significance of immediate and thorough examination, and why it's critical to have proper medical documentation for insurance purposes. The episode also covers common symptoms of whiplash, the impact of adrenaline and cortisol release post-accident, and the benefits of regular chiropractic check-ups to ensure spinal health. For anyone considering whether to seek chiropractic care after an accident, this episode offers valuable insights and recommendations.

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Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. thanks for tuning in for another episode of Ask the Chiropractor. This time I was asked about a new patient that came in. The new patient came in. They came in for something, I think it was lower back. Something unrelated to the question. The question was, when I showed 'em their x-rays, I had noticed they had degeneration at C 5 and C 6. The rest of the spine was perfect, the very little degeneration, all the rest of the discs were good except for C 5 C 6. And I asked the person, I bet you were revolving auto accident, weren't you? A few years back. And I suppose you didn't see anybody for it 'cause it didn't hurt the time. And they said, absolutely. And I was asked how do you know if you're in an auto accident, whether or not you should go see a chiropractor afterwards? And so I want to answer that question today. I was in a car accident. Should I see a chiropractor? How bad do I have to be? What are the requirements? Is it weird to go see a chiropractor after an auto accident? And I want to extend this into more than just an auto accident. I wanna talk about maybe I fall spill an injury, something happened. How do I know to go see a chiropractor? Who do I ask? Who do I talk to? Number one, the only person that's qualified to answer whether or not you should see a chiropractor after a motor vehicle accident or a trauma is a chiropractor. So if you happen to have a family doctor, you happen to have a physical therapist, you happen to have a strength conditioning coach, maybe you went to the emergency room, you ask them that you should go. None of them are qualified to answer that question no more than they are qualified to answer questions about your teeth. You'd only ask a dentist. So if you're involved in a motor vehicle accident or something weird happened, you should always converse with a chiropractor. Now very kind thing to see a chiropractor after an auto accident. A lot of people after an auto accident, they actually don't feel bad. They say, I got in the accident. I said, what's going on? They, I don't really feel bad, and everything feels pretty good and I don't know bother going. I want you to understand that genetically speaking, we're all hunters and gatherers. We're designed to be outside walking the earth, picking fruits and berries, hunting small animals, but most importantly, avoiding large animals. And when you're involved in a mortar vehicle accident, that's a very unnatural process for our genetic makeup. We were never designed to be in these giant thousand pound vehicles going at those speeds and cladding with each other. Our bodies just aren't designed for that. So when they do happen, it's a very unnatural thing for the way our bodies are designed and made to be. So you immediately have a cortisol release, an adrenaline release when you're involved in auto accident. You go into fight and flight, your body thinks something's bad's happening, and you don't always feel the pain right away. That's just part of survival mechanism, and so the adrenaline and cortisol can mask the pain at that time. So you might be involved in a whiplash or a trauma accident, and you say, you know what? It was a pretty bad wreck, but I really feel fine. Now, the dangers of this is what happens in two weeks from now. What happens in three weeks from now? You see when that stuff starts to wear off and go away, and all of a sudden now you're getting headaches. Now you're having some problems sleeping. Maybe now your hands are going numb. Now you're having a hard time looking to the left or to the right, or up or down. Now all of a sudden, the chemicals in your body have worn off, and now the pain kicks in. But you already told the insurance company, you don't have any injuries and it's been documented and now you're in trouble because now it's the auto accident's been closed, your car's been fixed, and now you're having pain. So it's really important to get checked right away. And I also want you to understand, it doesn't have to be a big wreck. It doesn't have to be a big accident. Microtrauma is a whiplash. So because of force can happen is even under 10 miles per hour. Again, these are big vehicles with a lot of inertia hitting each other can cause you to move and whip around a little bit. Very common symptoms. Now, if you suspect whiplash, some of the things would be common. Whiplash are obviously neck pain, stiffness in your neck, vertigo or dizziness and headaches. But again, these don't always show up the day of the accident. They can come on much, much later. And so you don't wanna just go by how you feel that day. So what do you do? I've been involved in the accident. What should I do? I should go see a chiropractor. Why do I want to go see a chiropractor? We're gonna take x-rays of your spine. We're gonna do assessments of your neck, and we're gonna see how it's actually moving. One of the fun ones that we've been known to do are we call flexion extension series. What is that? We take an x-ray from the side, a neutral one, meaning that you're just standing there straight up and down. Then we take one with you, looking up as far as you can look up. Then we take another one with you looking down as far as you can look down. Now, what does this tell us? This shows the bones moving, so we have a little piece of film that we put up and we draw all the vertebras on the neutral one where you're sitting still. Then we have you look up and we look at 'em level by level, and properly moving neck. All the bones would move and you look up and all the bones when you move down. Not all of the same severity. But they would all move up or move down. There wouldn't be any two that were stuck. And so how we checked this is we put that piece of film up with the original drawing of your neutral one, and we could pair the, let's just say the C3. The C 4. An extension and flexion. If we find out when you're looking down, those two are the same positions when you're neutral. Now we know those bones aren't moving. Now we know those bones are fixated, and you've heard me talk about a subluxation before one or two year bones are misaligned. That creates stress. The body will lock up to protect those bones. When that sends a stress response out to wherever those nerves go, the chiropractor's job is to restore the motion so the bones can get unsated and go back to normal positioning and function. So if you're looking up and down and they're not moving, the function part is gone and those x-rays can demonstrate that some chiropractors actually go so far as to have moving x-rays, that you can actually watch the video and you can see 'em happen. I don't have that piece of equipment. I think it's really cool. I don't happen to have it. So we use the film instead to make up the difference, so we're able to see whether or not you fixated. Now, if you're fixated after the accident, we can assume it happened from the accident. It, maybe it was there before. It doesn't really matter. If you had a broken arm before a car accident and you get in a car accident and you re-break your arm, it's you, the auto accident's still responsible for the broken arm just'cause it was broken before and it rebroke doesn't mean they're off the hook, they're still involved in it. So if you had a little bit of a neck issue before and you got whiplash and now that spot's worse, it's still part of the accident. Rehab. So I go to a chiropractor that takes those kind of x-rays and takes a deeper dive into what's going on. We usually also do an exam. We have you turn your head different ways, measure the way you move, ask if there's any pain, and maybe twist and turn. You push on your head, push on your shoulders, and we may be able to expose something that you don't normally feel in your everyday activities that will suggest there's been an injury also. Now, if you're going to the chiropractor for this, what we do in my office is we see you anywhere between four and six times. Dimmy reevaluate you. You see an auto accident claim isn't designed to make your spine perfect. It's supposed to help with the injury. So we continue to see you, like I said, between four to six visits until you start to show positive findings, or excuse me, the positive findings start to become negative, so it hurts. When I do this, I do an exam after five visits, I do it again and it still hurts, but not as bad. We do another five visits. I do it again. Pain's gone. Success. We can now dismiss you. So the chiropractor should, if you're under auto action, it should be doing regular exams, not only to track your progress, but in order to show the insurance company that what we're doing is working and we're on par again, a lot of these things don't get detected when the accident first happens by you. The chiropractor could find these and like I told the patient that came in with a question. They had didn't have a lot of pain, maybe a little pain a couple weeks later, and it went away. Now, fast forward many years and now the bones have started to show change, permanent change, the disc are now suffering even when the chemo lower back pain. This person's gonna have really bad neck problems later in life because they didn't address this situation when it first happened. Another nice thing that happens when you go see a chiropractor immediately following an accident is now there's documentation. Because the insurance companies, a lot of times, will close the case. If you say there's no injuries. Three months later, you start having injuries. Now it's kinda hard to say did this really come from the accident or did you do something else? And now you're on your own. A lot of attorneys won't even work with you. So by going in to see the chiropractor right away and getting the injury documented, this will help you down the road. Even if maybe you go in and say the chiropractor looks at you and says, yeah, you got a little bit of a whiplash. I bet we can see a few times and probably close this case, I've had some cases that are only been four or five visits and we've dismissed them. But the nice part is should that person later on have more things returned. We can go back to the original exam findings and show that maybe the patient was worse off than we originally thought they were. Maybe they still had adrenaline, cortisone still going on. So it's really nice to have those stuff documented in in, in the records. Also, when you're involved in an auto accident, if you're gonna see a chiropractor or a physician. It is really important that when the insurance company calls you to ask what's going on, that you tell them to talk to the chiropractor, what's going on? Because we have a better job explaining our exam findings of what's going on and our goals and our care plans and our realistic outcomes than you do, because that's what we're trained to do. And you're just listening to us and repeating, kinda like the old telephone game. You say secret to one person, they say it to another person, they say it to another person. By the time it's done, the secret's totally changed. So it's best off just to have the insurance companies contact the chiropractic office directly and then they can communicate with the insurance company what's going on. This way you don't say something you're not supposed to say, or something's not misinterpreted. And hopefully you don't get involved in auto accidents a lot where the chiropractic clinic has lots of patients that come in with auto accidents and we're a little bit more rehearsed and practice on how to handle these situations. So if you've been in an auto accident, you've been in a, any kind of a trauma, whether it's work, whether it's falling down the stairs, whether whatever it is, and you're asking yourself, I wonder if I should see a chiropractor. The answer is probably yes. And you might go to the chiropractor and they might look at you and say, you are fine. Everything's good. But only the chiropractor can really make that assessment. There might be physical therapists that want to spinal manipulate and stuff like that, but they don't really have the training that we have when it comes to really looking at the spine and the biomechanics of it. That's just one part of what they do. But the biomechanics of the spine is all we do. That's our everything of who we are as chiropractors. So go in to see a chiropractor after an accident's a great idea Again, what should it look like? You should have to fill out a lengthy history 'cause it's gonna go to the insurance companies for the injury. You should bring anything with the reports in from the accident. So the carpenter has copies of those. You should be prepared to have a thorough exam. Turn here, do this. Does this hurt? Does this hurt? And you should be prepared to have some type of imaging thinking of you in order to document the injury and also to help the carpenter take better care of you. That's how I do it in my office. Are there other ways to do it? Yeah, I'm sure there are, but that's a typical case in my office, how we do it. The other thing you should also expect is a follow-up exam and not two months down the road, not three months down the road. It should be a little bit more frequent than that. In order to continue to document necessity of care, chiropractor might assign you an ice pack to take home with you, and then along the way they might give you some exercise instructor to work on. Also, they might actually refer you to a physical therapist to work with the injury along with the chiropractic care. Or some chiropractors had PT departments in their office or maybe a massage therapist. This is all common practice when you're involved in an accident in order to rehab the muscles and get you back to normal. So there you have it. If you've been in an auto accident or some type of work injury or something like that, go and see the chiropractors a great idea. Now every state has different laws on the work comp injuries, so you wanna check with your state laws. I do not know all 50 state laws. But you can go to chiropractic.org. That is the International Chiropractic Association. That's a national website for all the states, and they know a lot these answers. And there's other references you can find too, to find these answers. Call the state association, the Chiropractic State Association wherever you are. If you're in Illinois, I would tell you to call the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association and they would be able to tell you your rights and your, and what you can and can't do better than somebody else that. Coming from a different source. Maybe even the insurance companies might not tell you the laws as well because they're in different states too. But the state association should always know those answers if you run into any problems. But there you have it. Ask the chiropractor if you've been involved in an auto accident or took that of comp injury. Should you go see a chiropractor? I hope I answered that question thoroughly for you. Hope you understand it. Again, just because you don't hurt today doesn't mean you're not gonna hurt later. Recently had somebody come in, they said they got a little offender bender, they don't really feel too bad, start adjusting him. Anyways, started the auto accident case anyways, and after about four visits they said, you know what? My neck is getting really stiff. I'm really glad I started with you. I'd be scared to see what happened had I not. And he goes, we can't, we don't have that magic mirror to answer that, but I was really glad he started to. So again, if you have a question about it, find a chiropractor. If you want me to answer a question for you I'd be happy to do that. Leave a comment or a message below, wherever you're watching or listening to this, and we'll get back to you. And heck, maybe next time you'll be the question of the week. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you and like to share this podcast. And again, questions of leave comments below. Thank you.