Auto Accident

Ask the Chiropractor - Should I seek chiropractic care if I was in an auto accident?  Dr Hulsebus explains why you should visit a chiropractor when ever you are in Ann auto accident.  Also what can happen if you do not.  #healthy815

www.rockforddc.com

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- Hello. I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor, here at Rockford, Illinois. Welcome to my podcast here of "Ask the Chiropractor". What's "Ask the Chiropractor"? Well, a lot of times, people have questions about chiropractor care. They're not sure where to find the answers. So, I wanted to start a podcast where people can submit questions to me, a chiropractor, to find out the answers from a licensed chiropractor. All too often you'll see information about chiropractic, and they'll ask you to check with your family doctor or somebody else before you come. Well I'm here to break the news to you, your family doctor doesn't know much about chiropractic, only the chiropractor does. So, if you have a question about chiropractic you'd like me to answer, please feel free to send me a message. Leave a post below, give the clinic a email at rockforddc.com, I'd love to answer your question maybe here at a future episode. But today's question comes to us from somebody that was involved, unfortunately, in an auto accident. Where they were in their car and somebody hit them and they were not at fault, the other driver was at fault, and they want to know if they should get checked. They wanted to know that they need to get checked because they didn't feel that bad the next day. Of course, you know, the insurance company calls you and says, "How you feeling?" You say, "Well, I'm feeling fine." They wanna move the case and move on. You know, I understand because the insurance company wants to clean off their desk and get things off of in front of them. But if you're involved in an auto accident, a lot of times people don't feel pain for several days later. And I tell most people, if you're involved in an auto accident, getting checked by the chiropractor is always a great idea. Now, here in my office, what we'll do is if you come in from an auto accident, is the first thing is we'll try to see whether or not you were injured, and how do we do that? Well, we take X-rays of your spine. And sometimes we even do X-rays where you look up, and you look down, and we try to see if some of your vertebrates maybe aren't moving. They call that a flexion extension series. We're able to take those X-rays and then we put a piece of film up above them and we draw on the film. We draw the vertebrates out in the neutral position. And we have you look up and look down and we'll see if two of them maybe aren't moving when you look up or when you look down. When you look up and down all your vertebrates are supposed to be moving. So if we find that two are fixated then we know we have an injury. We also do a battery of orthopedic tests, where we have you measure your range of motion, push on you, you know check different things to see if it hurts. Means it will also tell us if you were injured in an auto accident. Auto accidents are interesting because you gotta understand that, genetically speaking, we're all hunters and gatherers. So, we're never been meant to get hit that hard or that much inertia, force or anything like that. So, you get involved in auto accident can be very strange to our bodies. That sometimes we don't feel any discomfort for a few days. That's why coming in and getting those X-rays taken and doing that exam are huge to find out whether you have an injury. And the sad thing is some people don't come in and get checked, 'cause they feel fine. Then what happens is, even happened this morning, I X-rayed somebody and I see two of their vertebrates in their neck, the C5 and the C6, right down here in the base of your neck. And those are the ones that innervate your hands. But those are also the ones most commonly injured in a whiplash. And what we do is we x-ray them many, many years later and we see that there's no degenerative changes or arthritic changes throughout the entire spine except for those two vertebrates. And they look at me, you know what? I was in a car accident about 25 years ago. And I say, well, it looks like those might have healed wrong. And that's where you have the only spot in your spine. That's showing age and wear and tear. And a lot of times that age wear and tear is irreversible now it's, it's there. It's there. There's not much we can do, except for try to make it a little slightly better compared to the healing potential of other places. So it's very important, you get checked to make sure you don't have any fixations. So let let's say, You come in to the chiropractor and, and they do all these tests for you and they do all these exams for you. What happens next? So you have a positive finding now, what do we do? Well here in our office, we're friends with a lot of the orthopedic doctors and other doctors in the area. So if we feel the need to bring somebody else in, we will, but let's just say you don't need that. You just need a good chiropractic care. What we do is auto accidents are meant to help recover you from an auto accident, not fix, lifetime or problems or bad posture and stuff like that. Then it's meant to get you back to pre-accident condition. So in our office, what we do is we'll do six adjustments. We'll probably do maybe three times a week, maybe maybe twice a week. We'll do, we'll do six adjustments, six chiropractic visits. Then after that, we will do another exam, and we'll retest the things that were positive the first time. And we'll recheck your range of motions and stuff like that. And if all that comes back clear then you're dismissed life goes on. But if they come back negative or, or what I should say come back positive, but they're still finding then what we'll do is we'll set you up for another six adjustments and another exam at the end. And so by doing the regular exams we know where you sit with the auto action injuries. So our office, our general rule of thumb is about every sixth visit we'll do one. Now another clinic might do it, every fifth visit every 10th visit. I don't know. But if you in an auto accident, you should be getting reoccurring exams. Sometimes I'm given records from other clinics, to, to look at from third parties. And I see that, somebody went to the chiropractor three times a week for six months cause they were involved in a auto accident, there's no exams, nothing, and that's not real chiropractic right there. That's somebody, somebody not treating the auto accident the way they should. Here in our office what we'll do, like I said, we'll do the initial exams, we'll recheck those findings every six visits and see where you are. Now, once you've done those visits let's say maybe you've done three cycles of six visits for 18 visits. Maybe you were parked in a car at a red light waiting for the light to change, and somebody hits you going a 100 miles per hour drunk. Maybe it takes two years of visits. I don't know. That's why we do the exams. A lot of times people call us up and they say, hey, I got into a car accident. How many times do I have to come in? Well, we don't know, that's why we do the exams. Now, obviously the first time we do an exam if your range of motion's really good, you only have one or two positive findings and maybe we only find a your necks fixated in one direction and not in both directions, you probably don't need a lot. But if you were hit by somebody and your car flipped or something crazy happened, well then you're probably gonna need a lot more care than the average person would because of that. Or, you know, the sad part is if you had something already, you know, you know we've had patients that have had previous surgeries we've even had a patient that was scheduled to have surgery and they got into an accident. And, and that complicates things that may prolongs it. So I took classes on whiplash. I took classes from Dr. Dan Murphy from Life University. Where we studied the whiplash injuries, and how injuries occurred and the best ways to watch them, and help them heal. The most common injuries, as in the neck, of course cause that's the part that gets whipped around. Luckily today our cars have really, really good seats and airbags and stuff like that. So a lot of the other injuries we don't see as much of. But there's reasons why you can injure your neck, going back and forth. You can actually have lower back pain from injuring your neck. Cause when you look at a spinal cord itself the outside diameter or the spinal cords where the nerves go that innervates your lower back. And so if you whip your head back and forth really quick and violently you could cause swelling around the spinal cord. And the spinal cord gets the widest width. It expands out at the C5, C6 area. And if you remember, I said, that's the area the most common whiplash area. So you have a spinal cord that comes down and makes a nice kinda like a nice round thing. But right at five and six, it expands gets wider. The part that's wider is the most vulnerable for injury because it's wider. And it happens in the most common injury spot the C5, C6 area. And this is the nerves that go into your lower back. So I've had patients whose lower back looks great. They pass all their orthopedic tests and the lower back, the x-rays look clear. But they have tremendous lower back pain, and we adjust their neck after a whiplash case. And as the neck gets better, lower back pain goes away. It's pretty cool neurology stuff. You know, if you like neurology stuff. But that's also the kind of things that we're trained for to look at when you get injured in a car accident. And again, we work with other doctors and other physicians. So if you, if you thought you needed to go somewhere else, or if you already went somewhere else. We're gonna obtain those records and we can expand on that chiropractically speaking. And if you need to go to physical therapy then we can continue the physical therapy. Most auto actions don't require that much because it unless you wait too long to get in, the longer you wait to get in, it also prolongs the care. So we've had people call us, say Hey, I just got hit by a car. I said, okay, are you okay? They said, yes. And they haven't even called the police yet. And they haven't even called the tow truck or nothing yet. They called us first. And you know, we could be there third or fourth call. We don't have to be your first call. But make sure you get in right away to get that spine checked and make sure we don't have injuries for too long. Cause the longer they're there, the longer it takes to get rid of them. And if we do the exam and the x-rays and everything's clear, then congratulations you got in a car accident and you did walk out unscathed and that's amazing. And that's great. And I like to buy whatever car you were driving. Cause it sounds like it's a good, safe car for my kids.(Brant Chuckles) But if you have any questions about this, or if you've been in an accident, and you wanna know, whether chiropractic care can help you. Go ahead and reach out to us. Again you can reach us at rockforddc.com You can call the office at (815)398-3434.(815)398-3434 You can also text us there. If you have a question we're always here to help. We're always here to take care of you. And if you have a question you like to see next time on ask that chiropractor, go ahead and reach out to us and the same way and ask your question. And maybe next time, you'll see this, hear this. I'll be asking your question until then stay safe. Hope that by talking about auto accidents, I don't put the jinx on anybody. But if it happens we're here for you. That's why they call them accidents. Other then that stay healthy, stay strong, and talk to you real soon. Bye Bye(energetic outro music)