Revitalizing Recovery: The Benefits of Chiropractic Care After an Automobile Accident

Ask the Chiropractor- did you know you should get checked by a chiropractor after an automobile accident?  Only a chiropractor can tell you if you have chiropractic injuries. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

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. Well, hello, welcome to another podcast. If you listen to the last two weeks, it was a part one and part two. And I will say this is kind of an unofficial part three because several people had questions about part two. Part one and part two were about the common, most common questions that people ask my staff about chiropractic care. They're the ones answering the phones and getting initial questions before someone signs up to get care. And the first question was, how many times do I have to come? And the second most common question they got was, will my insurance cover this or can I use my Medicare at your office? And if you want to know the answers to those two questions, I'll invite you to go back and listen to the last two podcasts. But this is kind of an unofficial part three. Because in part two I believe he talked about auto accidents and I didn't realize it at the time, but that's opened the window for more and more people to ask me questions now about how does chiropractic care work with an auto accident? How important is it that I go see a chiropractor after an auto accident? And if I don't have any pain, should I still see the chiropractor? So I like to discuss this topic. So this would be like I said, an unofficial part three to my two part series. So if you get into auto accidents, you can go see the chiropractor. Typically you don't need a referral, you don't need anyone to tell you you can go, you just go. Now, if you were in a bad car accident and you went to the hospital and they took X-rays of you and stuff like that, you wanted to make sure you bring the copy of those X-rays with you or call the chiropractic clinic ahead of time so they have time to get those actual X-rays to their office to take care of you. If not, the chiropractor will probably take new x-rays of you. Chiropractors, we study a lot of whiplash. That's a lot of what we see. We study a lot of physical trauma and injuries and stuff like that. We see a lot of that in our office. So if you're in an auto accident, you are a prime candidate for chiropractic care. Now do the auto accidents cover chiropractic care? Well, yes, most of the time they do. Now it kind of depends on are you the reason the accident happened or are you the victim? If you're the victim of a car accident, come on in, the other person's insurance going to cover your care. If you were the cause of the car accidents, we won't judge you. But sometimes you have limit in how much coverage you have. Sometimes we can, you know, you only limited so much coverage. But then you talk to your chiropractor, bring your insurance's policies in, they should be able to look that up for you and give you those answers. I know here in my office we can do that. So the chiropractor should be able to help you with that. So is it important to go see a chiropractor after a car accident? Absolutely, I can't tell you how many times I have a new patient that comes in and they'll come to see me and they'll tell me they have lower back pain. Like, oh man, my lower back's killing me and we'll take an X-ray of their spine. And a lot of times we'll X-ray their neck also. Because if you've ever heard any of my podcasts, I often talk about the righting reflex, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, the righting reflex. And the righting reflex says no matter what, your eyes stay level with the horizon. So if I have a kink in my lower back and I sway to one direction, my neck will turn and sway the opposite way to keep me level. So if you're coming in to see me the lower back pain and to see that you've got some difference in your shoulder height, we're going to take a look at your neck too to see where this all starts. Or you know which one's the chicken and which one's the egg. Most people don't care, just fix me, so we take care of both. But if you come see me for lower back pain, a lot of times I'll X-ray your neck too and I'll look at you and I'll say, hey, you got some serious damage in your neck. Were you ever evolved an auto accident or a whiplash? And they'll look at me, oh yeah, like five years ago. But it didn't hurt, but I look at their X-ray, I can actually see the discus thin. But a lot of people call degenerative disc disease. I always say it like that because it's not really a disease, it's just a thin disc with dehydration from a lack of motion. You get a lack of motion when you injure the joint and the joint will stabilize itself to keep it from getting hurt more. But in the process the disc dehydrates and starts to show wear and tear and left long enough, it'll start to become arthritic. So a lot of times we'll take someone's neck x-ray for lower back pain and they'll tell us yes, I was in an auto accident five, six years ago and I said, wow, did your chiropractor not x-ray your neck? And they'll say, oh I didn't go to a chiropractor, I didn't have any pain. And then we discover you probably should have, we discovered you have a little bit of permanent changes now to your neck and now that it's been five, 10 years, there's no real recourse on this and it also leaves you potential to having real neck problems later on. So my current patients that are under my care, if they get a little fender bender, they'll come in and we'll just take a quick x-ray of their neck, do a little range of motion test to make sure they're moving okay. And sometimes if they tell me they don't have any pain, we might just do three or four adjustments and then dismiss them. Otherwise, if there are in pain and there's a lot more going on, we'll do it. So how do we handle auto accidents in my office? Well, you come in and the first thing is we need to document the injury. So sometimes we'll just take a whole bunch of X-rays, adjust your neck. We might take X-rays of your whole spine. It depends on what's going on, then we'll do an exam. Will we push on you, pull on you and ask you if, does it hurt when I do this? Does it hurt when I do that? Then what we'll do is we'll give you six, typically six chiropractic adjustments. I say typically because everyone's different and unique. But typically we'll give you six chiropractic adjustments. After that we'll do a reevaluation at those test findings are all still positive. We'll do it again if some of those test findings are negative now, we will change the coding of what we do, meaning that we might downgrade, you know, neck, middle, back, lower back, hips, tailbone. We might just make it lower back and tailbone because everywhere else is now asymptomatic. Then we'll do another six exams, then six visits, excuse me. Once we do all your orthopedic findings and you come back negative, everything's good, you feel good again, then we dismiss you. Because the auto accident's only designed to pay for relief of symptoms. It's not designed to fix your spine. That's what other chiropractic care is. We're talking about an auto accident now. The auto accident's supposed to give you back to pre-injury status. And so we do as we do, like I said, we'll do six visits then exam now the frequency of your visits will probably decrease as the care goes on. Sometimes people come in daily when they're first in a auto accident, then we'll do the re-exam, then we'll maybe do every other day and they'll maybe do twice a week or once a week. It all depends on your findings and how you heal. Now what if you were already a patient, you got in a car accident? Can we still use the car accident or do they try to say it's predetermined? Well it's an insurance company. They usually always say it was already preexisting and already existed before. But that's why we do the exam. That's why we do the new x-rays and stuff like that Because we're able to document this as a new injury. If you had a broken leg and you get a car accident and your leg re-breaks because you got in a car accident, they're still liable for re-breaking your leg. It's not off the hook because your leg was already broken. So if you're already having neck issues and you get rear-ended and then you have more neck issues, don't worry, it's a whole new thing. And then the chiropractor should know how to document and record this. So if you are already under care and you get an accident, you can definitely start auto accident claim and you should, it should be documented for your own personal wellbeing and peace of mind later on. So that's kind of how auto accidents work in a chiropractic clinic. Should I get it checked when I get an auto accident, yes. Your chiropractor might just say, you know what, let me just feel what's going on. How fast were you going? Hey Doc, I was, you know, parked at a red light and the other car just kind of bumped me. It just might be one adjustment to make sure you're good. But if you're at a red light and you're stopped and somebody hits you and they're drunk and they're going a hundred miles per hour, we might take care of you for a really long time. It all depends on all the situations and the accident damage. If you're in a 1976 Volkswagen Bug and you get hit by a semi, you're going to need more care. And if it's the other way around, you're probably going to need less care. It all depends on what's going on. So how much you need to come, that's what the exams tell us. Your chiropractor, if you're seeing someone chiropractor for an auto accident, you should have frequent examinations to mark and and note the progress of your care. All too often I'll be asked to review records of a chiropractor who maybe took care of somebody for six months and there's never been a re-exam, never been a determination of need to continue care. Those auto accidents just never the patient ends up on the hook for those. So if your chiropractor is not doing regular exams during an auto accident, it's definitely time to seek care somewhere else before you get in big trouble. There you have it, should you see a chiropractor if you're in an accident, every time. Now I'll briefly talk real quick about a work comp claim. I talked a lot about this in last week's podcast. If you're hurt at work, you're going to see a chiropractor is definitely an option. This is going to change state by state. The accessibility to chiropractors in the state of Illinois, you can only pick one doctor of your own choosing. Now that one doctor you pick can refer you to any doctor they want to, but you can only pick one to go to. So if you got hurt at work, you go to the emergency room, you pick the emergency room, that's your doctor. If work sent you to the emergency room that that doesn't count, you follow me. Work is allowed to send you to a doctor too. Basically, your work's allowed to send you to a doctor because they want to make sure that you're not faking. So they have the right to have a doctor examine you. You do not have to do what that work doctor tells you to do, but you need to go see the work doctor. You can't not not go. But if you pick a primary doctor for your first doctor and you want to see a chiropractor, now the primary must refer you to a chiropractor. If you pick a chiropractor first and the chiropractor wants to have you see your primary, the chiropractor can refer you. He works both ways, and again, I'm talking about the state of Illinois. That's where I am, I don't know the laws in every state. If you want to know more about work comp claims and how they work in your state, either contact the International Chiropractic association at chiropractic.org. Otherwise, find your local state association and ask them. So work comps, you can definitely get chiropractic care for. I believe in every state, it's just the rules about how many doctors you can see on your own. Stuff like that vary, 10 years ago in Illinois, you could pick two doctors of your own choosing. Governor comes in, changes the rules, and I can only do one. So check with your individual state, there you have it. Auto accidents and work comps. Definitely good to go see a chiropractor. And don't ask your medical doctor whether or not you should go see a chiropractor. Why they don't know what chiropractors do. They're not chiropractors only ask a chiropractor chiropractor questions just like you would only ever ask your dentist questions about your teeth. You would never ask a podiatrist questions about your teeth. Well, hey, if you got questions like this follow-up question I got on this topic, go to my website, rockforddc.com. That's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, and I'll try to get back and answer your question for you. Otherwise, maybe next time you'll be the question of the week. Until then, stay healthy, stay strong, and if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, only person that's qualified to answer is a chiropractor. Thanks everybody.