Massage can help whiplash. It relaxes the neck and shoulder muscles the injury tightens, eases pain, and brings blood and oxygen to damaged tissue. Timing is the catch: most people do better waiting a few days rather than booking one the afternoon of the crash, and you should clear it with the doctor treating you first. Whiplash is one of the most common injuries after a car accident and one of the most misunderstood, so here is what it actually is, how to recognize it, and why it is so easy for an insurer to dispute.
What is whiplash?
Whiplash is an injury that may be considered a neck sprain or strain. It is caused by a sudden, hard back-and-forth motion of the neck and is often seen after automobile accidents due to a collision causing a person to jerk back-and-forth in their seat. This motion causes the bones, discs, ligaments, muscles, and nerves in and around the spine to get damaged. It often affects the cervical spine, the upper neck, as the head extends forward and backward in a snapping motion. Whiplash is a soft-tissue injury, meaning the damage is to muscle, tendon, and ligament rather than to bone, and it turns up most often after rear-end collisions.
How do I know if I have whiplash?
Whiplash affects people differently in the severity, type, and location of the injury. As a result, the symptoms people experience and their recovery time differ for each person. Some people may feel pain and discomfort for only a few days, while others can still feel “off” for several months. A case of very severe whiplash can cause symptoms that may even last a lifetime, such as difficulty sleeping or chronic headaches.
Whiplash can affect the neck, shoulders, and arms. Some of the most common symptoms include neck pain and stiffness, limited or lost range of motion in the neck, tenderness in the neck, shoulders, or arms, headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, and blurred vision. Some cases produce acute pain that fades as the soft tissue heals, while others lead to limitations that last months or even years.
Symptoms can have a delayed onset
It is important to keep in mind that whiplash is a kind of injury whose symptoms may have a delayed onset. This means you may start feeling the symptoms after a day or two, and some injuries are asymptomatic at first and worsen over time. Many whiplash victims believe their pain after the accident is normal and may not attribute it to actual tissue damage, which can lead to the damage being overlooked until the pain worsens and mobility in the neck becomes limited. That is why seeking immediate medical attention after a car accident is imperative no matter what. If your neck was jerked at all during the collision, you should see a doctor as soon as possible to get it treated.
Why soft tissue injuries are hard to detect
One problem with soft tissue injuries is that they are difficult to detect using scans and x-rays, especially early on. This, in turn, is used as a tactic by insurance companies to deny claims, allege that plaintiffs’ injuries are exaggerated, and make compensation difficult to obtain. The sooner you receive medical treatment for tissue damage, the more documentation you will have to demonstrate the effects of your injury and correlate it directly to your auto accident. Do not ignore an immediate onset of pain in your head, neck, back, or shoulders.
Is a massage good for whiplash?
One treatment option for patients with whiplash is a massage targeting the neck and shoulders mainly. Whiplash can injure and damage the sternocleidomastoid muscles (SCM) and the tendons surrounding them. The SCM muscles are located on both sides of the neck and work to help your neck’s range of motion, allowing you to turn your head left and right.
Any type of massage can help muscles to relax, relieve pain, and increase the oxygen reaching the damaged tissues so that they stay healthy. Getting a massage targeting the neck and its muscles can help these muscles to repair themselves and relax, thus relieving some of the pain you are experiencing. In particular, trigger point therapy is one type of massage that can decrease pain by releasing the tension in specific parts of muscles.
It would help to wait a few days after the accident before you get a massage in order to allow the neck muscles some time to heal on their own at first. You also want to get your doctor’s opinion on how much a massage would help and when it would be best for your specific injury to receive one.
Recovering compensation for a whiplash injury
If another person caused your injuries, you can file a claim against them for monetary damages. Medical care for whiplash is not cheap, and it is less cheap still when complications follow. A claim can cover medical bills, lost wages, and other losses that came out of someone else’s carelessness, including pain and suffering.
The deadline is the part people miss, and delayed onset is exactly why. In Illinois you generally have two years from the date of the crash to file a personal-injury claim (735 ILCS 5/13-202), so waiting to see whether your neck settles down can quietly use up the window. If the vehicle that hit you belonged to a city, village, transit agency, or another local public entity, the limit is one year (745 ILCS 10/8-101), which catches a lot of rear-end cases involving buses and municipal trucks. Illinois also reduces damages by whatever share of fault is assigned to you and bars recovery once that share passes 50% (735 ILCS 5/2-1116).
Helping our clients is about counseling, advocating, and ultimately solving problems. 844-SEE-MIKE is a Chicago-based injury law firm representing individuals and their families who have suffered an injury in an accident, and we can deal with the insurance adjusters, the medical bills, the property damage, and the lost-wage paperwork so you can focus on healing. You pay nothing unless we recover money for you.
Contact 844-SEE-MIKE
If you or a loved one has experienced whiplash or a similar soft tissue injury from an accident, 844-SEE-MIKE can review what happened at no cost and tell you honestly what your options look like. Every case turns on its own facts, and the information here is general rather than legal or medical advice.
