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Common Types of Soft Tissue Injuries found in Vehicle Accidents

Generally, soft tissue injuries are caused by whiplash injuries or some other way your body is thrown about in an accident. Even if you wear seat belts, those safety items can lead to more violent types of whiplash injuries just because they restrain your body from being tossed about like a rag doll. The sudden cessation of your body movements in a car wreck can often cause painful injuries that these safety restraints work to avoid. It’s ironic, but for every solution, another problem arises in life. Since the advent of mandatory seat belts, whiplash injuries in car wrecks have steadily increased. Whiplash injuries place greater tension on your spine, sometimes even stretching it between your head and the base of your spine. It’s elementary physics. You’ve seen magicians pull a tablecloth out from underneath a fully-set table. The same “shock” properties are involved. So, when your body is fastened into the seat with a seatbelt unless your head is securely fastened and another strikes your car, the head keeps going, but the body stays where it is. This “whips” the head back (or forward or sideways, depending on the direction in which you were hit) and puts tension on the spine, and “stretches” it sharply and in less than a second.
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When the back returns to where it was a couple of seconds later, it doesn’t always return to the way it was. Whiplash is so painful because it causes damage to the actual spinal tissue, which houses a tremendous amount of nerves, in addition to neck pain. Whiplash can cause headaches: even serious migraines. Spinal tissue is just part of the brain that resides in the spine. It is an extension of the brain. When you sharply compress the spinal tissue, it pulls at the back of the brain, which can cause minor damage to the brain tissue: hence, chronic headaches in . Nerve damage is another serious form of soft tissue injury. Nerve fibers are delicate and connect thousands of points in the body to the brain through the spinal column. Hundreds of nerves go to different parts of our body between each of our vertebrae. The common cause of nerve damage in a car accident is found in stretching a body in a vehicle accident. Various body parts can be stretched or bent awkwardly so that the outer tissue in the bend stretches in a direction counter to the normal way the nerve membranes are supposed to stretch. Think of your elbow that is normally designed to stretch one way. If something happens and instead of bending in, it is to bend out suddenly, that’s a good example of how a nerve can be stretched and become a source of chronic, and sometimes excruciating, pain. Nerves can also be compressed in generally the same way. But instead of being stretched, they are compacted by some violent force. Over hundreds of thousands of evolution, certain nerve tissues became resistant to certain loads or stresses. So, when they experience such a shocking load, they become damaged. This can result in loss of motor control (in the case of damaging a “motor neuron” within nerve tissue), or, arguably worse, the nerves associated with pain receptors can become damaged, which causes immense and almost constant pain. Nerve tissue takes the body to heal considerably longer than most other tissues. And some nerve tissues can’t be repaired at all.

Muscle tissue injuries are just as painful. Most lower back pain is muscle tissue damage rather than spinal tissue damage. Pain in the shoulders and other obvious muscle groups display the same chronic pain characteristics after the victim has been hurt in a car accident. Minor joint injuries can originate in compressive injuries, as we’ve mentioned above. When someone braces for impact or slams on the brake pedal, all of their mass becomes multiplied due to the G-forces resulting from rapid deceleration and is concentrated on – for example – one ankle in the driver’s brake pedal foot. In other words, your ankle that is designed to support 180 lbs now normally has to support up to as much as twice that amount for a brief period of time. This compresses the cartilage and other soft tissues resulting in injury. We’ve seen severe cases where someone’s leg snaps under these compressive forces. This same phenomenon also applies to the knees, wrists, and elbows. The knees, however, have another problem to worry about: they often slam into the dash in an accident. In short, the forces of an auto accident don’t have to cause catastrophic injuries for them to be severe. And suppose any form of soft tissue injury dogs you as a result of a negligent vehicle accident (or any accident where the negligence of others has harmed you). In that case, you have a right to be compensated for medical bills, pain, and suffering, lost wages, and disability if it applies. C