What Happens To Your Body During A Car Crash - Dr Ekberg

If you get a whiplash in a car wreck you can get symptoms such as pain headaches

dizziness etc but I'm gonna tell you the real reason that you need to be

concerned stay tuned I am Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life

and if you'd like to truly master health by understanding how the body really

works make sure that you subscribe and hit

that notification bell so that you don't miss anything people in a car accident

they're often told that they get a whiplash and they they have neck pain

and the whiplash caused that but what is it so let's talk about the mechanics in

a car accident a little bit so you're sitting at a traffic light for example

and someone hits you from the back so what that means is that your body is

still but the car gets pushed out from under you so your body moves forward and

your head is sitting still and your head your brain perceives that as the body is

leaving and the head is getting left behind and the brain says this can't be

good and the head weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of a bowling ball and

it's suspended on this flimsy little neck by muscles so when the head gets

left behind the brain is gonna try to keep up with the body so it starts

contracting the muscles on the front but because the head is so heavy and this

impact is so sudden there's no way that these muscles can keep up with that

tremendous force so what happens then is the muscles get micro-tears you start

tearing little fibers within the muscle and then if you have a headrest that's

properly positioned meaning kind of high up hopefully then

the headrest will catch the head and you're not going to get an excessive

extension of the head because that could be really damaging so make sure that you

have your headrest in a proper high position

but then the head bounces on the headrest and then it starts going

forward so first the head was moving back then it bounces and now it starts

moving forward and now the same procedure happens again but in Reverse

so the muscles on the back of the neck contract to try to keep the head from

falling off the shoulders going forward so first you get some little micro tears

in the front and then you get little micro tears in the back and these tears

they're sort of like a really hard workout if you've ever had one of those

you know that you feel a little stiff the first day you feel really stiff on

the second day and then it culminates the worst stiffness the soreness is

somewhere between 48 to 72 hours so that's why when you've been in a car

accidents that's where the stiffness and inflammation is the worst either of

those things is not a terribly big deal because your body can fix that your body

can heal micro-tears it can get rid of the inflammation and so forth but here's

why we need to be concerned first we need to talk about how does the body

normally work how does the brain and normally control the body well we have

something called proprioception that's feedback so the brain controls the body

but the brain needs information from the body so if you move your hand then it's

the brain sending the signals but the hand has to tell the brain exactly

what's going on so that the brain can manage that precisely if the brain gets

accurate information accurate feedback the brain can do a precise job of

controlling it same thing happens with the muscles in the neck but

in a whiplash you have trauma you have impact you have inflammation you have

micro tears so you get really really stiff and for a few days or even a

couple of weeks after you move really really stiff and things aren't moving so

well so it's the movement that normally provides the information that gives the

brain an accurate picture of what the world looks like and the combination of

the trauma from the whiplash and the stiffness that keeps you from moving

much means that you have a reduced amount of feedback to the brain and you

have distorted information so now the brain does not have a true or accurate

or sufficient picture of what the world looks like so after a couple of weeks

you may have less of a stiffness you may recovery may feel pretty good hey it

wasn't so bad I'm feeling 80% better but you've set yourself up for a vicious

cycle because that reduced information that inaccurate perception of the brain

can come back to haunt you years months and years later so a lot of people they

don't really have a problem with it for several years but then two years three

years five years down the road now they start having some issues and at that

point it's hard for most people to link it back to the car accident but once we

find people with arthritis or stiff neck poor curbs poor posture there's almost

always one or several whiplash accidents in several years prior to that so that

is why I strongly recommend that you would get some good quality chiropractic

care after you've had a car accident whether you have any pain or not there

has been a distortion those signals and it's in your best

interest to get that taken care of and if you get some chiropractic treatment

make sure that you don't just get enough to feel a little better make sure that

you get enough care that you restore all of those signals so that you have a

correct and true picture represented in the brain from all of that feedback so

that means all of the muscles the anterior scalenes the

sternocleidomastoid muscles the extensor muscles they should all be firing

perfectly which we can test through applied kinesiology you should have a

perfect range of motion you should restore the range of motion so when you

rotate your head and look to the side or when you tilt your head to the side or

when you bend it forwards or backwards all of those ranges of motions should be

restored and there should be no pain or stiffness associated with that that's

how you know that you have reset all those communication pathways and you're

not gonna get any issues with this years down the road so if you know someone who

has been in a car accident recently or even months of years before share this

information with them so that they can learn the consequences and how

everything functions and how chiropractic and even nutrition can be

very beneficial to resolve that those problems if you're new to this channel

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