month later and say, ‘I can’t move my
neck.’ So it will seem like the pain
occurs overnight, but the injury was
from four or five weeks prior.”
While neck pain is the biggest
symptom of whiplash, sufferers may
also experience headaches.” The neck
pain will radiate into the head causing
people to have headaches,” says
Berkson. “You also can experience
blurred vision, or trouble swallowing.”
A WIDE RANGE OF DAMAGE
Chiropractors say that not every case
of whiplash includes a subluxation. “In
many cases, we’re actually dealing more
with damage to the soft tissues
themselves,” says Dr. K. Andrew
Shepherd, a chiropractor with a private
practice, Mountain Health Chiropractic
and Wellness, in Plano, TX. “A less
severe form of whiplash is where you’ll
see the muscles themselves causing
some edema and splinting. A slightly
more severe form of whiplash will
involve the surrounding ligaments and
tendons, where you have some tearing
of all of those fibers.” The most severe
form of whiplash is where you have
subluxation or a physical break of the
vertebra, he says. “Research has shown
that if you’re involved in whiplash injury,
such as a car accident going over 10 miles
an hour, it’s the same force as a 20 pound
bag falling from a building onto your head,”
says Shepherd, who warns that untreated
whiplash can lead to osteoarthritis
degeneration.
TREATMENT
To treat whiplash, chiropractors will
typically take X-rays of the neck to
determine the extent of the injury. Often,
chiropractors will administer cold laser
technology, which can help heal the soft
issue injury, says Shepherd. “Cold laser
is phenomenal for being able to take out
a lot of the muscle spasm that people
experience with whiplash,” Shepherd
says. “This will help determine whether
to use an instrument or manual
adjusting. Sometimes, you may just do
physical therapy and rehabilitation for
the first few visits before you can start
to do some chiropractic manipulation.”
The area of the body where
adjustments will be administered varies
from person to person. “As