If you have been in a San Diego car accident, you can at least be comforted by the fact that approximately 1 out of 8 people in San Diego are in an auto accident each year. After doing approximately 700,000 chiropractic adjustments I would say that at least half of the treatment I do is because of either injuries from recent auto accidents or injuries from auto accidents far in the past.Sports injuries might slightly beat Auto Accidents or come in a close second.
If you found this page, you may have been looking for a San Diego auto accident attorney or a San Diego chiropractic office. Either way I will give you the basic information to get you started. By the way, I am not an attorney and anything I have on this page should not be taken as legal advice, if you need a good attorney I have lots of great contacts I could refer you to.
The first thing after an car accident, is to make sure that nothing life threatening has taken place to you. There are the obvious things such as broken bones or bleeding, but I am guessing if you have one of those this website is not the first place you turned to. If you do have an obvious broken bone or bleeding from your auto accident for gosh sakes dial 911 and put down that keyboard. The not so obvious things are the hidden broken bones.
People often expect that if they broke a bone they would have excruciating pain. The funny thing is, it depends on what part of the bone is broken and what part of the body it is in. When I broken my elbow I did have excruciating pain, (by the way I was skateboarding in a half pipe, trying to explain to some kids that were watching how to do a front side aerial, bad idea). On the other hand, over the years, I have seen a good handful of people who had small fractures of their vertebrae and had little or no pain. So if the car accident had any significant amount of force at all, you would definitely want to be checked out by a doctor and possibly have an x-ray taken to evaluate if there is a fracture.
The thing that is surprising to most people is just how little force it takes to injure someone. In physics, there is an interesting thing that takes place. If you take a light weight object and jam it into somebody going really, really fast it would do little or no damage. An example of this would be a one year old child on a bicycle going 20 miles per hour who runs into a full grown man. I’m not saying the guy who gets hit won’t get some cuts or bruises, but the little kid is probably not going to cause any significant permanent damage. On the other hand, if you take something as big as a cruise ship even if it going one mile an hour and it bumps into the back of you without you expecting it, the potential exists for it to kill you. All that force is transmitted into you body in a single second.
The same thing goes with car accidents, if I am driving my Toyota Landcruiser, and someone rear ends me with their Honda Civic, and they are going 10 miles per hour they are barely going to budge my car. But on the other hand, if someone is sitting in a Honda Civic and somebody gets bumped from behind by someone driving a Toyota Landcruiser, that car is going to take off like a billiard ball. Even when small car like a Honda Civic hits another car such as a Honda Civic, the person inside the car still weighs very little compared to the two cars. So the person inside can get accelerated and thrown at remarkable speeds, compared to the speed of the cars and the amount of apparent damage on the bumpers. Some cars are designed so that they have the bumper compress and bounce and show no damage at all, but it still can throw the person around quite rapidly.
The bones in the spine are tiny compared to the size of a car and weigh only a few ounces. If your seat is hit just right during the accident and throws you forward or to the side, the amount that the vertebrae can be thrown out of alignment can be significant. A vertebra will normally just fall back into alignment on its own, unless there’s also muscle spasm that goes along with it afterward. That muscle spasm can squeeze the bones together and can cause them to get stuck. You can read about that in the cartoon book on my website.
Often people don’t have any pain after the car accident, but instead have their worst pain, from my experience and observation, about two weeks after the auto accident takes place. This of course doesn’t count the ones that have the severe broken bones or internal injuries. So my suggestion is if you have a car accident, even if it was only a 5 or 10 mile per hour accident, have a good chiropractor check you out, to make sure that all of the vertebrae are still moving well, and none of them have got stuck out of alignment.
And of course, for gosh sake, if you think there’s even a chance something might have gotten broken, make sure to go immediately to the emergency room, probably in the ambulance to have them check you out and take an x-ray and make sure nothing got broken.
Over the years we have done work with many, many hundreds if not thousands of people who have been involved in auto accidents, so if you have any other questions feel free to call my office and we would be happy to answer your questions at no charge. If it is a legal question, we have some great attorneys we can refer you to.