What does injury mean?
The legal definition of Injury is any physical or emotional harm. Damages can be claimed for psychiatric illnesses and physical injuries as an outcome of your accident.
What is a whiplash injury?
Whiplash mostly occurs in vehicle accidents involving sudden acceleration or deceleration. Whiplash is a term given to the soft tissue in the spine being stretched and strained, when the body is thrown in a sudden and forceful movement.
What is whiplash motion?
The whiplash motion starts at the time of impact in an accident. The head is thrown backwards whilst the body moves in a forwards direction. The muscles and ligaments in the joint get excessively straightened as a result of this movement, which is known as hyperextension. The head may then get thrown forwards causing the neck to over bend, which causes the chin to touch the chest. This movement is call hyper flexion, which can cause further damage to the neck.
The process for hyperextension, hyper flexion and returning to the typical neck position can take approximately 1/5th of a second. A whiplash injury can occur in a very short period of time and most people think that whiplash only occurs at high speed. Research has shown that in a car accident of no more than 8 mph, the head will move up to 40cm in a very short period.
The energy in an accident is transferred directly to the occupants of the vehicle. This energy comes from the change in velocity of the striking vehicle decelerating and the struck vehicle accelerating.
Whiplash is medically known as soft tissue damage. The whiplash movement very rarely affects the bones in the neck when it occurs; it is usually the muscles, joints and ligaments which suffer the effects and can cause extreme discomfort.
What is Whiplash-Associated Disorder?
The term whiplash was only meant to describe the flexing action of the neck rather than a neck injury. A study which was carried out on Whiplash Associated Disorders (WADs), called Quebec Task Force looked into the whiplash motion and its resulting injuries gave this definition to clarify the issue:
Whiplash is an acceleration-deceleration mechanism of energy transfer to the neck. It may result from rear end or side impact motor vehicle collisions, but can also occur during diving and other mishaps. The impact may result in soft-tissue injuries (whiplash injury); this in turn may lead to a variety of clinical manifestations (Whiplash Associated Disorders).
Some symptoms of Whiplash Associated Disorders can include neck pain, restricted neck movement, shoulder pain, tingling or heaviness in the arms, dizziness, tinnitus and pain down the legs.
What are the most common symptoms?
The most common symptoms of Whiplash Associated Disorders are pain and restricted movement in the neck. Research in the USA and Australia found the cause of neck pain to be in the facet joints. The facet joints are covered with a lubricating fluid and cartilage that allow the joint to rotate but do not perform their job properly when damaged.
The most common symptom of a whiplash injury as reported by over ¾ of people diagnosed with a Whiplash Associated Disorder are headaches. These occur due to damage to the cervical area between C1-C7 and are known as cervicogenic headaches. Inflammation of the nerves and damage to the joints and cervical discs are all possible reasons for cervicogenic headaches.
After a whiplash type injury pain in the lumber region of the back can also occur due to damage to the discs, facet joints and sacroiliac joints, which is experience by about half of whiplash sufferers.
Are there any less common symptoms?
Yes. Less common symptoms, what are reported by around a quarter of whiplash sufferers can include tingling in the arms and fingers, pain and heaviness. These can be caused by nerve inflammation as a result of cervical disc damage.
If damage is done to the starting point of a nerve, the pain is felt at the site the nerve serves. This is called referred pain and some whiplash sufferers experience pain in the arms and shoulders due to this, even if no injury has been identified in that area.
Whiplash sufferers have also reported memory loss, depression, concentration loss, sleep loss, irritability, ringing in the ear (tinnitus) and sometimes vision problems. All of which are considered to be caused by either pain, medication or very rarely a slight brain injury.
How do they diagnose Whiplash?
Identifying a whiplash injury can be extremely difficult, and many people who sustained a whiplash injury did not receive any treatment due to the injuries being dismissed as something suffered by hypochondriacs, purely because the injuries could not be seen on x-rays or identified by physical examination.
However whiplash is now a well document occurrence and the resulting injuries have been seen in many studies. Because of this, Whiplash Associated Disorders are now taken more seriously by doctors and it is easier to get compensation for your whiplash injury.
After a road traffic accident in any type of vehicle, anyone with suspected whiplash will often visit the accident and emergency department at the hospital or their local GP. The doctor will ask what symptoms the victim has, the circumstances of the accident and carry out a physical examination. If the doctor suspects a possible fracture, an x-ray will also be carried out immediately.
How do they Diagnose Whiplash Associated Disorders?
Further testing maybe carried out if after 12 weeks the symptoms persist or are painful. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, computed tomography (CT) scans, and electromyography are some of the techniques used to pin point a certain neck injury.
MRI scans can be used to the benefit of whiplash patients to see injuries, which include disc hernia’s, disc injuries and nerve compression due to the user of magnetism to visualise the tissues in the body.