Thanks for dropping in! Delayed pain from fender benders? Don’t be fooled by it! Please read on!!!

After nearly 4 decades of caring for auto accident-related spine injuries, I’ve heard hundreds of patients tell me how they felt immediately after a fender-bender. The most common words used:

• shocked

• angry

• anxious

• confused

• worried about the car

In a great many cases, pain of any kind was not their initial experience. That came later…sometimes quite a bit later! Why? There are few different reasons. We’ll explore them.

Endorphins

These are feel-good chemicals secreted by the brain when you experience a sudden threatening shock to your system. The brain perceives this shock as a threat, and pumps out chemicals called endorphins that cancel out pain signals coming from injuries.

Adrenaline

A sudden shock to your system will also cause the release of adrenaline, normally thought of as a hormone to boost your heart rate, but it also lowers our pain perception.

Why?

Endorphins and adrenaline are secreted as part of the fight or flight response, which is a set of primal survival reflexes that kick in automatically when your nervous system perceives a threat. It’s designed to automatically give you the ability to fight, or run for your life without being crippled by pain impulses, should you also be injured at the same time! These chemicals can remain active in your system damping-down pain perception for hours or even days after the shock of a car crash.

Inflammation Cycle

While you are ‘high’ on endorphins and adrenaline, your body is aware of injury and begins the inborn healing process which starts with normal inflammation (NOT the chronic inflammation I’ve written about at length that is damaging to the body). This process causes swelling around damaged tissues and the migration of white blood cells that pump out chemicals that are initially irritating. This process may take up to a few days to get into full swing, and as the pain masking chemicals wear off, the ones involved with inflammation elevate pain levels.

Mechanical Breakdown

If a wreck knocks your tires out of alignment (drastic example above), they won’t function normally. Even minor alignment problems will cause your tires to break down rapidly. When you undergo a whiplash type of jolt in a car accident it can knock vertebrae out of alignment. If they stay that way they will not glide with respect to each other the way they should when you move around. This over time will lead to friction and ‘pathomechanical forces’ that begin to inflame spinal joint surfaces leading to pain. This process can take days or even weeks to become fully noticeable to the injured individual.

This BTW, is why chiropractic care is so important after a jolt to the spine. We are the ONLY doctors who address this misalignment, and if it is left unaddressed, can lead to permanent spinal joint problems over time.

On the Level

• Call us first if you have been in a non-life-threatening vehicular collision!

• Get yourself checked, even if there is not a lot of pain - that may well be coming later, and early intervention is the key to recovery.

• Your auto insurance covers your care here very well, whether you are at fault or not.

• IMPORTANT - you have only two weeks from the date of accident to get checked if you wish to use your auto insurance benefit (PIP coverage). This is an arbitrary rule imposed by the insurance industry.

Thanks for reading along. Please forward this to folks you think it may help!

Until next time,

Blessings to you !!!