Whiplash After Your North Carolina Car Accident? A Surprising, Yet Controversial Cure…?
A recent car accident in North Carolina has turned your world upside down – possibly literally.
Perhaps a careless guy in a Ford truck rear-ended you at a red light, or you got banged up when a delivery truck veered into your lane on the freeway without notice. You’ve been feeling quite uncomfortable and “tight” in the days and weeks following the crash. You might have already been diagnosed with whiplash or some other musculoskeletal disorder.
The battle to get compensated appropriately for your car accident in North Carolina may be a long slog. You can speed up the process of obtaining a better result (and seeing justice done) by connecting with an established North Carolina car accident law firm. Other measures can help, too, like seeing a physician promptly, collecting information from the scene of the crash, and keeping robust notes of your conversations with witnesses, insurance company representatives, etc.
All that’s important. However, you are probably very concerned with the whiplash or other muscular pain. What’s causing it? What can be done to fix it?
Obviously, you should not try to self diagnose – you need a physician’s opinion. However, there is a really interesting, if controversial, theory that you might want to read about during your research. Dr. John Sarno, best-selling author of books like The Mind Body Solution and Healing Back Pain, posits that very real pain conditions like whiplash, repetitive strain disorder, carpal tunnel syndrome, and lower back pain, may be perpetuated by psychological factors as opposed to physiological factors.
Sarno’s basic thesis is that, in Western Society, it is often unacceptable to express emotions such as anger and exasperation. And so, instead of yelling or beating people up, we “swallow” the rage and frustration. It becomes internalized and physicalized as problems like a tight back or whiplash-like syndromes. This isn’t to say that the pain is “all in your head.” To the contrary, there seem to be pretty well established physiological mechanisms why the pain occurs – due to oxygen deprivation and other problems caused by so-called muscular trigger points. Typical treatments for problems like whiplash focus on eliminating or reducing these trigger points through massage, acupuncture, stretching, strengthening, etc. But Sarno contends that the perpetuating factor is psychological. Once you accept his diagnosis – all it takes, in Sarno’s perspective is education about the “real” problem, which he calls TMS – the brain stops suppressing the negative emotions and automatically releases the trigger points and helps you feel better.
Sarno’s theory sounds absolutely bizarre to the most people, when they hear it for the first time. He and his followers do point out some intriguing studies and hard evidence that seems to suggest they might be on to something. For instance, Sarno points out that an “epidemic” of whiplash took hold of Norway, once physicians in that country began to diagnose the condition. When researchers looked at a control group in Lithuania — people who had been involved in serious car accidents that should have given them “whiplash” — they found that the Lithuanians’ rate of whiplash was essentially zero. So, perhaps, the diagnosis of whiplash gave these people whiplash. It’s very interesting and counterintuitive. But certainly something that you might want to explore, as you do your research.
More Web Resources
The Gist of John Sarno’s Theory
The Norway/Lithuania Whiplash Study
