Any sudden, sharp movement of your neck that causes your head to jerk back and forth quickly can cause neck strain or sprain, also referred to as whiplash, which is damage to the muscles, tendons, or ligaments that hold the neck upright. Whiplash can result in the inability to turn your head from side to side, headaches, and pain in the neck and down the back. Luckily, this is not something you will have to suffer through for the rest of your life. However, the pain and immobility you experience while recovering can keep you from your daily life activities. To speed up and encourage your recovery, you may want to visit a chiropractor. Here are a few things he or she can do to get rid of that pain in your neck.
Range of Motion Exercises
The old treatment for whiplash was to give you a neck collar to keep your neck immobilized until it healed. However, the medical community has found that this practice was wrong. It has been determined that moving the affected area encourages it to heal. A chiropractor will work with you, moving your neck slowly in all directions. These movements will be a bit further than you are comfortable performing yourself, so you stop before reaching the limits. The medical professional will push you to new limits with each session. While this might be a bit painful, it will become easier and less painful with each visit.
Massage
After working out the area with the range-of-motion exercises, you may be given a massage to help relax and soothe the muscles that were just pushed. This will also encourage blood flow to the area to help heal any tearing that may have occurred. The massage may include trigger-point therapy to reach the areas that are causing the most pain. This is also beneficial if any of the nerves in the area are being pressed on or stimulated by a muscle spasm.
Very seldom will whiplash require more invasive treatment than the manipulations a chiropractor provides. He or she has trained extensively in the different ways of helping the bones, muscles, and soft tissue heal in a gentle, natural way. As an added bonus, getting a massage will feel great and help put that pain in the neck at bay until it can be healed completely.
Contact an organization such as TLC Chiropractic to get started.
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