The holidays are here. And with the fun and festivities often comes a hectic pace as you prepare for guests, hustle through work, or travel to be with family and friends. Decorating, your home or office, cleaning or moving furniture, can also lead to painful injuries that take the glow off your celebration. Roads crowded with merrymakers and families hurrying to remote destinations, combined with foul winter weather, create the perfect storm for auto accidents, often serious ones. Each year, tens of thousands of holiday travelers are involved in serious accidents of this type.
Whatever the cause, holiday accidents often impact your back and neck. If you’re in an accident where you’ve been rear-ended, you may suffer from whiplash. This occurs when the force of the impact whips your spine backwards and forwards at the neck, frequently leaving your spine out of alignment and causing lingering back pain. It can also severely strain your neck muscles, causing stiffness and pain there as well.
Sometimes we tend to ignore the pain of injuries until they become debilitating. Toughing it out isn’t wise: pain is a message. Left untreated, a painful condition may become permanent. Studies indicate that about half of whiplash victims suffer from their injuries years after an auto accident.
Chiropractic care for auto accident injuries can be effective in both the short and long term. Chiropractic adjustments relieve pressure on the nerves and muscles as it restores spinal alignment. Pain is alleviated without drugs and full range of motion restored through a combination of chiropractic treatment and prescribed exercise.
Slip and fall accidents around the home while preparing for guests are all too common and can be another cause of injury and the source of potentially chronic back and neck pain. Spinal disc tearing and pinched nerves are just some injuries that can result, and which can be effectively treated through chiropractic care.
The holidays make for a busy workplace as we hurry in response to shortened deadlines or more customers. Workplace falls can result in a soft tissue injury, causing pain to your lower back or neck through misaligned vertebrae. Treatment of this sort of injury is a core competency of chiropracty with its focus on spinal health.
For any of these holiday injuries, your chiropractor may recommend spinal manipulation, a high-velocity, short lever arm thrust applied to misaligned vertebra. The goal is improved functionality, reduced irritability and pain, and restoration of full range of motion. Chiropracty is a holistic medical discipline that believes the structural integrity of the spine is the key to good health, dependent as is the nervous system on the spine.
What should you do for holiday injuries?
Whatever the source of your neck and back pain, modern chiropractic techniques can help alleviate your pain and promote healing without invasive surgery or the use of risky of prescription drugs.
We at Dr. Philips Chiropractic Nutrition and Wellness wish you and yours a happy and safe holiday season. And be careful out there.