Does A Minor Auto Accident Require Chiropractic Care?

If you’ve been involved in a relatively minor traffic accident, one that does minimal, if any, damage to your vehicle, do you really need to see your Arlington chiropractor? After all, if your car is okay, you must be okay too, right? While that may seem like a logical assumption, it is not necessarily a correct one according to one piece of research published in Medical Science Monitor.

In this particular study, researchers searched through several different databases, taking a more in-depth look at auto accidents that occurred at rates lower than 25 miles per hour, creating minimal structural damage to the vehicle (roughly $1,000 or less). For each one they found, they noted the amount of injury that resulted to the people in the vehicle, the severity of the injury, and how long the injury symptoms lasted.

Based on their findings, researchers concluded that “property damage is an unreliable predictor of injury risk or outcome in low velocity crashes.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if the impact of the auto accident was strong enough to cause damage to your vehicle, you may have still sustained an injury.

Therefore, if you’ve been involved in a minor auto accident, you are still going to want to get checked out by your Arlington chiropractor to ensure that no auto injury exists to your spine. It only takes a couple of minutes, and the pain and aggravation it can save you years down the road is well worth the time.

Reference

Croft, AC, & Freeman, MD. Correlating crash severity with injury risk , injury severity, and long-term symptoms in low velocity motor vehicle collisions. Medical Science Monitor. October, 2005. 11(10).