Car accidents are, unfortunately, all too common an occurrence, with over 4.5 million people hurt every year in car accidents, many of whom end up suffering back and neck injuries. Neck and back injuries may be common, but they are by no means inconsequential. Some back and neck injuries can have serious aggravating ongoing pain that can significantly impact a person’s quality of life. These injuries can cause severe and long-lasting consequences. Even less severe injuries can have long-term effects if they are left untreated by medical providers.
Treatment for spinal injuries has changed drastically in the past 20 years. Pain Management is no longer about narcotic medications, its about providing sustaining medical alternatives to surgery. If you can avoid surgery, then you should. There are considerably more options available to individuals injured in care accidents. Pain Management doctors can offer patients less invasive spinal injections that can improve their overall long-term quality of life when compared to surgical options. If you’re involved in a car crash, you have the option of exploring alternative pain management treatment that could be the best choice for your lifestyle and medical needs. These pain management doctors are doing amazing new things in medicine and its worth your time to come up with an alternative treatment plan, rather than surgery, to help you recover from injuries caused by a car accident.
Car accident pain management necessitated by neck and back injuries can be challenging, costly, and complicated, and could affect an individual’s ability to function normally. Minor symptoms may be alleviated with simple rest, ice, and pain medications, but more serious symptoms such as numbness and tingling sensations, severe pain, sharp shooting pain, and burning pain through your arms and legs can cause alarming concern requiring immediate heightened treatment and care. Furthermore, dizziness, loss of balance, inability to sleep, muscle spasms, ongoing persistent chronic pain, and other symptoms could lead to expensive doctor’s visits, medical procedures, steroid injections, diagnostic injections, medication, and severely restricted activity. This may include an inability to participate in activities of daily living and work-related duties, resulting in extra time off work and lost wages. When this occurs, many accident victims search out the services of an experienced personal injury lawyer to recover compensation for damages.
One common neck injury many people sustain in a car accident is whiplash, which can occur in low speed crashes as slow as 5 miles per hour as well as moderate to high speed collisions. Whiplash occurs when an impact or blow causes your head to be suddenly thrust forward or backward, causing damage to the tendons, muscles, and possibly the spine. This causes tenderness, pain, and stiffness in the neck, shoulders, upper back, or arms, and a decreased range of motion. A whiplash injury can also cause dull or severe headaches in the days following a car accident. Symptoms can manifest within 24 hours after the car accident takes place, or they could take days, weeks, or even months to develop and become evident, as symptoms can differ vastly among whiplash sufferers. Brain injury which can cause thinking and memory problems can also occur as a result of whiplash related event – often referred to medically as a contrecoup injury.
Injuries to the spine are also a common result of a car accident. Two types of spinal injuries -- disc injuries and facet joint injuries -- are two of the most common, pain-generating spinal injuries. Discogenic pain can occur as a result of the kind of sudden, acute trauma experienced in a car accident, and the majority of sufferers experience this kind of pain in the lower back. Lumbar sprains, which cause the back muscles, ligaments, and tendons to be stretched too far, and spinal stenosis, which is narrowing of the bone canal housing the spinal cord can also be caused by acute trauma occurring in a car accident when a bone fragment or ruptured disc invades the spinal canal. Facet joint pain is caused when the joints which help support the body’s weight, facilitate movement between the vertebrae, and prevent the spine from moving too far in one direction or the other become damaged in a car accident.
There are several ways to handle car accident pain management to treat neck and back pain associated with an injury sustained in a car accident:
- Seek immediate medical attention at a local hospital emergency room.
- Give yourself a few days rest with limited activity to see how your symptoms develop.
- Visit with a doctor to undergo a physical examination within a week after the crash.
- Coordinate physical therapy to seek improvements in your symptoms under conservative care.
- Talk to your physician or pain doctor about getting an MRI to help pinpoint any disc injury, herniation and/or facet joint injury
- Ask your doctor about possible nerve block therapies and steroid injections.
- Steroid injections or ESIs can help with radiating pain through your arms or legs that comes from referable nerve pain in the neck and back – these procedures can eliminate and suspend symptoms to help people get back to normal quality of life with just some residual remaining pain or discomfort
- Talk to your doctor about ordering a facet joint block test – this is called a diagnostic injection - sometimes referred to as a medial branch block or MBB.
- If the diagnostic test is therapeutic and temporarily reduces your pain for a few hours or days, then the pain doctor is likely to recommend a procedure/injection as an alternative to surgery known as radiofrequency ablation – a medical procedure that can eliminate your symptoms for 6 months to a year in some circumstances.
- If the injection therapy or radiofrequency is unsuccessful and sub-therapeutic then surgery may be the only reasonable alternative necessary in your treatment plan.
- Surgery such as:
- Spinal laminectomy
- Spinal fusion
- Vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty
- Discectomy or microdiscectomy
- Spinal Cord Stimulation
- Foraminotomy
- Nucleoplasty
- Intradiscal electrothermal therapy
- Artificial disc replacement
Work with your doctor’s recommendations to treat your injury symptoms with effective car accident pain management so that you can heal from your injuries as quickly as possible, and avoid the need for prolonged potentially dangerous narcotic medication, expensive and invasive orthopedic or spine surgery and their extended recovery times.
Work With Whalen Injury Lawyers
Our firm of experienced personal injury lawyers in Denver and Colorado Springs has successfully represented many car accident victims over the years, winning millions in personal injury case settlements. Our personal injury attorneys are not afraid to take on the large insurance companies on your behalf to ensure that you receive the compensation you deserve. Whalen Injury Lawyers is proud to be one of America’s Top 100 Attorneys, 5280 Top Attorneys in Colorado, Top 100 Trial Lawyers, and Super Lawyers. We take on the fight for a fair settlement so you can focus on getting the treatment you need to heal from your injuries and move forward with life.
Our main goal is to establish a direct, meaningful, trusted and reliable relationship with you and secure a settlement that is fair and reasonable. Our personal injury lawyers will work closely with you to make sure that you are sufficiently compensated for any loss you suffer as a result of a personal injury. Contact us today for a free, no-obligation confidential consultation to discuss all your legal options.
You can reach our Denver attorneys at (720) 307-2666. Our office is located in the Denver Tech Center at 7955 East Arapahoe Court, Suite 2375, Centennial, CO 80112, and our Colorado Springs office is in the Alamo Corporate Center, conveniently located at 102 S. Tejon Street, Suite 1100, (719) 644-7000. We look forward to working with you.
