Whiplash Causes PTSD

Whiplash Causes

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Frequently, when a client presents after a traumatic event, there are signs that they may be reliving the incident. These may include recurrent distressing dreams, anxiety and avoidance of talking about or confronting the event. If these symptoms persist for more than a month and cause clinically significant distress, the trauma victim may be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Coronas, Garcia, Viladrich, Santos and Menchon (2008) published a paper examining a sample of trauma survivors who experienced a road traffic accident in 2004 and the subsequent relationship to PTSD. They reported, “It is known that a sizable proportion of motor vehicle collision survivors who seek medical attention (from 5 to 45%) will develop PTSD in the year following the accident, particularly in the first 2 months after the accident” (Coronas et al., 2008, p. 17). In this study, statistics of the PTSD group revealed (1) 76.7% were female, (2) 83.3% had what were considered moderate or minor injuries, (3) 53.3% had a change in employment status after the crash. “Interestingly, no relationship was found between PTSD and previous personal psychiatric morbidity or previous traumatic experiences, a result not consistent with general findings on this subject” (Coronas et al., 2008, p. 21). When evaluating the traumatically injured, long term persistent functional loss is not always due to damage to the musculoskeletal or nervous systems; it can be psychogenic in origin.

ABOUT US

Spine & Injury Centers of San Antonio is a local network of 5 chiropractic offices. As a group, we are raising the standard of care for injured patients and their families.

If you have recently been in a car accident, or had a personal injury, sports injury, or exercise injury, and are experiencing back pain, neck pain, knee pain, whiplash, headaches, leg pain, etc, our San Antonio injury chiropractors can help!

Our goal is to get you back to living a pain-free life as quickly as possible.

Click here to find a San Antonio chiropractor near me.

Reference:

Coronas, R., García-Parés, G., Viladrich, C., Santos, J. M., & Menchón, J. M. (2008). Clinical and sociodemographic variables associated with the onset of posttraumatic stress disorder in road traffic accidents. Depression and Anxiety, 25(5), E16-E23.