If you experience an automobile accident, it’s likely that the full extent of your injuries, including potential nerve damage, may not be immediately apparent. In many cases, symptoms of nerve damage can take hours or even days to surface after the accident.
What you might feel depends on the severity of the injury and how bad of a collision you were just in. You might feel nothing, with only numbness, then on other days, there is this sudden intense pain. If these are the symptoms that you are experiencing, you should visit a chiropractor immediately because this might be a sign of nerve trauma from the car accident.
What is Nerve Damage?
Nerve damage is damage caused by blunt force trauma, whiplash and/or lacerations – all of which are common injuries associated with car accidents.
Sometimes there is a nerve compression that follows a blunt impact to any part of the body, such as the legs, arms, head and other parts. In a severe case, a laceration may have sliced down to the nerve. The muscles are the usual source of damage after whiplash (a violent back and forth whipping motion due to impact). Depending on the severity of the damage, it is entirely possible to pinch a nerve in the neck or your back.
What are the symptoms of Nerve Damage?
Nerve damage boasts many symptoms such as:
- Temperature sensitivity, especially in hot or cold conditions
- Prickling feeling on the skin
- Involuntary twitching of the muscles
- Pins and needles throughout the body
- Toe, leg, finger and arm paralysis (typically temporary)
- Muscle pain
Since whiplash is considered to be the most common injury a person can get from an automobile accident, there is a greater chance that there is a potential for nerve injury as well – due to pinched nerves and blunt force trauma. There is a lot of emphasis on getting whiplash treated, because if it gets untreated, especially with nerve damage, there is a chance in getting a case of chronic pain.
What to do to help with Nerve Damage
It is recommended to see a chiropractor when experiencing any sort of pain after a car accident. This is because if the whiplash and nerve damage is left untreated, there is minimal chance of it getting better on its own.
A car accident chiropractor will help target the specific areas where the nerve damage is located, which in the case of an automobile accident, is likely in the neck and back. The chiropractor will then implement various techniques such as muscle and tendon manipulation, spinal adjustments and spinal decompressions to help reach down to the muscular level and therefore reduce the pressure on the nerve.
It should take up to several appointments before you start seeing the positive effects of chiropractic treatment – your pain will have reduced significantly, and other symptoms, such as temporary paralysis and numbness should also diminish.
It is strongly recommended to start handling the tissue damages as soon as possible after the accidents in order to lessen as much pain and lasting damage as possible.
