Scar Tissue and its Connection to Whiplash Injuries
How does your body heal from whiplash and associated injuries like neck pain, low back pain, paresthesia, sciatica, and headaches?
An automobile accident can happen in the blink of an eye. In just seconds, your body can be whipped and jerked around, causing injury to the ligaments and muscles of your neck, back, and other joints.
Both muscle and ligament structures are very similar – constructed of many fibers packed tightly together that lay in the same direction, like the bristles on a broom. However, the function of muscles and ligaments are quite different.
A ligament is a rope-like structure that connects one bone to another bone. A muscle is a dynamic structure that can change length to move bones. If you had ligaments and no muscles, your body could not move itself. If you had muscles and no ligaments, your muscles would just pull your bones apart from each other. The two structures work together as one to make the human body move.
When you have whiplash, the muscles and ligaments of the body are torn. Whether they are small tears or larger tears, the body repairs them with scar tissue. While healthy muscles and ligaments are organized tissues with fibers that mostly travel in one uniform direction, scar tissue that forms to repair the tears is not. It is similar to throwing a fistful of small sticks down on a floor – the fibers are completely disorganized and point in all directions.
Those fibers then attach to the injured tissue and tighten, pulling the damaged fiber back together. Unfortunately, that scar tissue often attaches to adjacent tissues as well and causes the adjacent healthy tissue to “pucker” toward the injury. With multiple injuries and multiple patches of scar tissue laying down and tightening, the overall length and flexibility of the involved muscles and ligaments is reduced.
Untreated, scar tissue shrinks more and more over time. A good example is the healing of a cut that required stitches. At first, when the wound is healed and the stitches removed, the scar is fairly smooth and flat. If you look at that same cut after a year, you may notice it has become a raised scar. That’s because the scar tissue in the layers underneath have matured and shrunk in on itself.
Similarly, when scar tissue in muscles or ligaments shrinks, it can cause misalignments in the body. Think about one vertebra in your back; the muscles that attach to it on the right and left side are mirror images. Their equal size and strength allow equal tension on both sides of the bone which holds it in its normal (neutral) position.
If the muscles to one side are injured more than the other, more scar tissue forms on that side and you end up with a vertebra that is pulled out of position because there is greater tension on the more injured side. This uneven tension causes misalignment of the joint, which causes increased joint friction with movement, which then causes neck pain, back pain, headaches, and other pain symptoms.
If the misalignment is bad enough, it may irritate the nerves exiting your spine resulting in numbness, sciatica, and burning or shooting pain into the arms or legs. When these misalignments are left untreated, the continued irritation and stress over a long period may also cause the body to reinforce the bones that form the joint, commonly known as arthritis.
How do you prevent all this? Organize the scar tissue as it forms. When your Chiropractor performs an adjustment to an area where there is scar tissue, the scar tissue is stretched and organized to better match the structure of the tissue it is repairing, whether it is muscle or ligament. You will feel less tension and pain in the area.
As the scar tissue shrinks back again, you will feel the pain and stiffness return, which is why chiropractic should be performed on a regular basis. With each adjustment, the amount of time a patient feels better and how much better they feel will increase until their pain and stiffness fade away completely between visits.
Scar tissue is easiest to organize when it is new, so visit your chiropractor as soon as possible after an accident or injury. If you’ve been involved in a recent car accident, call the Fayetteville Accident & Injury Center today and see if chiropractic can help you get your health back
