Life After Your Accident
Accidents happen; unfortunately, it is a part of life, especially in the crowded DFW metroplex. At Peace of Health Chiropractic Wellness Clinic, we believe that your care is only beginning after the accident. When you get into any accident, whether it be a car accident or a fall—regardless of the severity—your body needs the chance to heal and recover. We seek to act as the “springboard” of your health and recovery journey.
After the Accident
So, it’s happened—you’ve been in an accident, fallen, or injured yourself. You’ve been told to come see a Chiropractor to help you feel better. So, what now? The first phase of your Chiropractic care journey will be to help you get out of pain. Pain is a symptom, but unfortunately, like your check engine light in your vehicle, it doesn’t tell you specifics. In fact, pain by itself is often not a reliable indicator at all of what is causing your problems. What we are more concerned about is your function, because that will tell us more about how to help you best. Pain is, in essence, your brain’s perception of inflammation in your body. That is why it is not very reliable as an indicator for treatment, so we use other, more reliable variables to establish the degree of your injuries and use that as a benchmark for your recovery.
One such way we do this is either a “Neck Disability Index” or an “Oswestry Low Back Questionnaire”. These quantify the degree of your injury based on the level of pain you experience trying to do everyday tasks. For example, on the “Neck Disability Index” questionnaire, there is a question about reading: “I can read as much as I want without pain in my neck,” versus another option in the list, “I can hardly read at all because of severe pain in my neck.” Though these questions use language to ask about the pain you feel, they are asking about the functionality of your ability to complete a typical task. The function of holding your head/neck in a position to read for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. causes intense pain. With this information, we can now objectively approach your neck pain and curate care for you. Then, during your treatment journey, we will pause at checkpoints along the way to perform re-examinations, where we will review those same forms and see how you are progressing.
Say, you came in after an auto accident and were complaining of neck pain that caused you to not be able to read for longer than 5 minutes without developing neck pain. After establishing this baseline, care is provided for several sessions. You come back a month later and answer the same question, but this time you report that you can now read for 15 minutes before you experience neck pain. This provides us with an objective measurement for your recovery post-injury that progress is being made because your function is beginning to be restored.
3 Phases of Your Care
At Peace of Health Chiropractic Wellness Clinic, we divide your care into one of three phases: relieve, restore, and resume. The relief phase is the fastest phase that gets you out of pain, usually lasting two or maybe three weeks, depending on the severity of your injury and how long it has been a problem for you. The restoration phase is the phase where we are getting you back to your former self, as close to before the injury as possible. The last phase is where we ultimately want to see everyone, where you begin to resume your previous activities and shift into the wellness phase.
Your journey doesn’t stop when pain is gone
Hopefully, you don’t stop eating properly after you have had your annual bloodwork; likewise, you shouldn’t stop treatment when the pain is gone. Your body is still in motion, so it still requires occasional adjustments. The goal is to help get you to a place where you are coming in for a “tune-up”, for many people, this is once every one to two weeks. In response to this recommended treatment frequency, we offer affordable wellness packages to keep you moving well.
“A body in motion stays in motion.”
Your body is meant to move; movement is how our joints receive hydration and nutrition, through a process called imbibition. Imbibition is not unlike a blacksmith bellows that forces air into a furnace; the movement creates pressure that refreshes and replenishes the joint fluid and provides the cartilage with the nutrients it needs to remain healthy.
Yours in Health,
Dr. Grant Shelton, DC
Doctor of Chiropractic at Peace of Health Chiropractic Wellness Clinic
