Hey guys this is dr. Karl Baer duval performance healthcare today we’re gonna take you through how we treat whiplash here evolved performance healthcare. So again whiplash is an injury that is the result of major trauma to the neck or body that causes the neck to again do the forward and back which stretches a lot of those muscles and ligaments and tendons in the neck and creates a little bit of instability there.
So what we want to do when we’re treating whiplash is three things the first thing we want to do is obviously manage pain so that’s get you out of pain as goal number one the second is restore range of motion and then once the pain is died down we have adequate range of motion the most important part is in retraining that strength and stability to help prevent any long-term complications from whiplash.
So treat what a treatment looks like here is we’re gonna start with an adjustment so again adjustment has been scientifically proven to help decrease pain especially neck pain and headaches but it’s really effective at treating whiplash so again we just kind of feel for certain areas that get stuck and then from there just do a quick adjustment so left and adjustment to the right.
So again that’s gonna help decrease pain by getting more blood flow better nervous system function heading to that area then we’re gonna have our patient sit up and in terms of restoring range of motion there’s a lot of ways you can go with it let’s actually a swing you this way so we’ll work on our shoulder here so again a lot of times with whiplash what happens is the muscles if we damage our discs or damage our joints the muscles surrounding kind of tighten up to help protect that joint which is a natural response and it’s good.
But if it goes on for too long can lead to different complications limited range of motion which kind of leads to chronic pain so we do want to help those muscles calm down what we’re gonna show you that we use here in the office it’s a technique called instrument assisted soft tissue massage you might have heard of it called graston but the idea is that we can use this to help decrease tone of the muscles so it’s a really easy exercise or treatment we’re just gonna put a little gel.
So we’re going to work on the upper traps here the upper traps are pretty common area to tighten up before in a car accident and it’s again just nice and slow strokes this is going to be helped decrease the tone of this upper chat muscle a lot of times if there are adhesions in the muscle it can cause a little bit of redness as you kind of break up those adhesions in that scar tissue in that muscle good and then from there we can just do the other side and again this also can help with pain too.
So again as we decrease the tone of the muscle it’s going to help increase that range of motion of the neck but it also feels pretty good and it’s gonna help decrease pain as well so after we’ve done that again this doesn’t need to be long it’s about a minute and a half each side is all we need and then the next thing we want to do is again really start focusing on increasing that range of motion and one of the ways we can do that is through an exercise it’s called post isometric relaxation.
So again it’s not always that the muscles themselves are so tight and that’s what’s limiting range of motion and a lot of times it’s the those muscles are unable to relax and so this is a muscle energy technique just helps those muscles relax following a major trauma so to perform we’re just gonna have our patient turn to the right as far as she can and so if she gets stuck right there we’re just going to apply a little bit of pressure on the head have her turn back to the left with about a twenty percent contraction.
So go ahead and turn to the left and we’re just going to hold it for three two one and then when she relaxes we get a little bit extra range of motion we do that one more time so to go ahead and turn to the left and relax and just like that we got more range of motion and so those are three ways that we can help decrease pain and again return range of motion after we have that range of motion kind of restored what we would want to do is start adding in rehabilitation exercises which we’ll cover next time thanks for watching.