Do low speed car accidents cause headaches, neck pain, and other symptoms? We find the answer in this paper titled “Do “whiplash injuries” occur in low-speed rear impacts?”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9455663/
Many young drivers who are learning to drive end up having a car accident by the time they are in their mid 20’s. By the time we are in our 40s-50’s, most of us have had at least one fender bender. This paper, done by the European Spine Society, draws attention to rear-end accidents in Europe, showing that they can cause symptoms of whiplash associated disorders like: headaches, neck pain, shoulder pain, arm pain, numbness or tingling, TMJ/TMD, ringing in the ears and hand or wrist pain. What’s important and different is that low speed accidents (10-15 km/h or 6-9 m/hr) have a large enough impact to the soft tissue in the neck, that it can cause long term effects.
We see this play out every day in our office. I ask, “have you had any serious head or neck injuries?” and many times the answer is, “no, not really. I’ve had a few fender benders but we were going really slowly" and they describe an accident at 30 m/hr or lower. I then let them know that is enough to cause soft tissue damage to the tendons, ligaments, nerves, and muscles, even though they may not have symptoms right away and just brushed it off as nothing. We see people come into our office 5 to 10 years later experiencing pain and symptoms that resulted from those accumulated traumas as things start to break down.
For some, this then starts to make sense as to why they are feeling structurally “not right”. We hear it every day and people are looking for answers. Most of the time they are not given answers as to why they feel pain or why they don’t feel as well as they used to. This is a perfect example of how, as Chiropractors, we are trained to look past the symptoms and look for the CAUSES.
Unfortunately, we can’t magic wand away a life time of minor accidents and injuries to the head and neck, but we can restore the proper alignment to the joints. In whiplash injuries, one of the main problems that needs to be addressed is the misalignment of the vertebra, which is a core issue that upper cervical chiropractors work to address. We get to the source of the problem by correcting the upper neck, which is the most prone to accidents like low speed rear-end impacts.
So if you know of someone that has had a rear-end impact and is struggling with whiplash associated symptoms, like headaches and neck pain, get them in touch with our office and we can get to the bottom of what is going on.
Call our office at 603.380.9184
