Not-so-micro-trauma

                All this talk of micro-trauma… how about slightly more significant trauma?  If you saw the Facebook post regarding car accidents I shared, you saw that a 5 mph collision can result in injury to the spine and neck musculature.  Does that mean any incident at 5 miles per hour will result in a whiplash-type injury?  Does it mean all accidents that don’t break the magic 5 mile per hour threshold are harmless?  What is a horse shoe anyway?

Apple picking would be less fun if you fell out of the tree.  Just saying.

                Here’s the rub:  in a modern car, designed to keep the occupants as safe as possible, a rapid deceleration from 5mph may still result in mild, yet significant trauma and a crash at 20 mph may be harmless... there are many contributing factors that determine severity of injuries.  If you’re riding a bicycle and crash and are able to escape traumatic brain injury, your body will sustain much more serious injuries that it would at the same speed in a car.  People “throw out” their back picking up sticks and toys… All.  The.  Time.  How many stories do you hear of people getting injured at work from what seems like a minor incident?  Most people don’t want to take out workman’s comp (maybe a future topic to explore), which means that the body sustained injuries that were made more severe based on multiple factors.  People sprain their ankles walking.  I could continue, but I feel the point is made.

                Speaking of horseshoes, horseback riding can result in both chronic and acute trauma to the musculoskeletal system and spine.  A near-fall from missing a stair or two or a slip on the ice (it’s coming sooner than I care to admit).  All of these incidents can result in trauma that may have only minor immediate manifestations, but can, if not treated, result in issues in the long-term. 

                The biggest demographic for this is children.  Riding bike, rollerblading, skateboarding, learning to walk, trampoline accidents, falling from a tree and even minor sports injuries they are instructed to “brush off” can lead to unforeseen issues in the future.  A broken arm from falling from Mr. Johnson’s oak tree will be addressed, but often what isn’t checked is the spine and the supporting structures to ensure nothing happened to that.  And if there was no damage to the back, great!  Better to know for sure than to ignore and have something pop up later, much more difficult to deal with.  And think of all the injuries you sustained as an adolescent that you never told your parent’s about because you’d get in trouble due to the circumstances of the incident.

                If your child fell on her face and had a concussion, you’d make sure the concussion was dealt with and then you may take her to the dentist to make sure her teeth weren’t impacted.  Same holds true for a fall on your back.  It’s a relatively inexpensive means of ensuring nothing occurred in a collision that could grow into a more severe complaint down the road.  I will leave you with a physics equation:

G=9.8m/s² (acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared) a lot more physics goes into it, but jumping from a office desk (3.3ft) is the equivalent of a 10mph collision. 

Just like there is no automatically safe speed for a crash, there’s really no such thing as an automatically harmless trip, slip or fall.  Get checked by your chiropractor just to make sure everything's ok, and correct any issues that may occur.