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Best Treatments for Headaches from Auto Accidents

Have you walked away from a car accident feeling “fine,” but then struggled for days, weeks, or even months after with debilitating headaches?

You’re not alone.

In fact, headaches are one of the most common symptoms people suffer from after a motor vehicle accident. Luckily, there’s more you can do for your post-accident headache than take handfuls of painkillers or rub in smelly skin creams. Let’s talk about what causes these headaches, what treatments exist, and how the practitioners at Accelerate Health can help you get feeling better…faster.

What Causes Headaches After a Car Accident?

At the base of your skull are four muscles called the suboccipitals. These muscles are primarily in charge of your posture and moving your head and are especially prone to injury in a car accident.

The violent forward and backward motion that happens during a collision puts a great deal of strain on these muscles as you struggle to keep your head upright. The muscles become so tight, in fact, that they’ll form what we call trigger points—little knots or bumps in the muscle fibers that cause spasms.

Suboccipital Muscles and Headaches

In addition, the suboccipital nerve passes through the suboccipital muscles, and will get irritated when the suboccipitals go into spasm. This creates pain that starts on the back of your head and moves forward in a band to right behind your eyes. Sound familiar? It’s called a tension headache. The pain is deep, intense, and often hard to describe.

Up to 90% of people who experience whiplash develop tension headaches, and 30-50% of them continue to suffer from these headaches for more than six months. You deserve to live a pain-free life! If you’re suffering from tension headaches caused by an auto accident 6 days or 6 months ago, Accelerate Health can help.

What can treat tension headaches?

There are several treatments that can be used to treat headaches, including:

Spinal manipulation:
A practitioner performs a controlled thrust to your spine to restore joint function and help reduce inflammation and pain.
Soft tissue manipulation:
A practitioner manipulates your muscles, skin, tissues, etc with their hands or an instrument to improve circulation, reduce swelling or pain, and release tension.
Class IV laser:
Using a special light-therapy device, a practitioner delivers a special kind of light to your problem areas that help to reduce muscle spasms, decrease pain, and promote healing. It is non-surgical, non-invasive, and painless.
Cupping:
A trained practitioner uses special silicone cups to create a vacuum over the injured area with special silicone cups. The suction promotes blood flow to help with pain and inflammation.
Graston:
A trained practitioner in the Graston Technique manipulates the muscle and connective tissue with specialized tools to increase blood flow, reduce scar tissue, and increase mobility.
Therapeutic exercise:
A practitioner will teach you quick and easy exercises to do at home to help reduce the tension in the muscles at the base of your skull and alleviate pain.
Functional dry needling:
A practitioner inserts thin, monofilament needles into trigger points around the injury to reduce pain and increase range of motion.

It’s important to remember that there is often no one special silver bullet to alleviate your pain. That’s why you should always work with a practitioner who is trained in many different modalities and can combine them to help you achieve optimal health.

How Accelerate Health Can Help

While your practitioner here at Accelerate Health here in Denver will use a variety of techniques in your custom-built treatment plan, one of our most effective therapies is dry needling. Let’s take a deeper look at what it is.

Trigger Points

Remember those trigger points (knots) hanging out in your suboccipital muscles, sending pain across the nerves in your head? Dry needling targets those trigger points, helping to heal them and stop the cycle of spasms and pain.

Your provider at Accelerate Health will identify the location of trigger points and insert a thin, monofilament needle into the trigger point and send a small current into the muscle. This current will cause the muscle to contract and reset back to its original healthy state. (Kind of like turning your computer off and then on again). Once the muscle is reset, there will be less irritation hitting the nerve, reducing your headaches.

Dry Needling

If it sounds scary, don’t worry. Our Denver auto-accident chiropractors are fully trained and certified in dry needling. In fact, it’s safe, minimally uncomfortable, and proven to be extremely effective.

Please note that dry needling is different than acupuncture. While the tools are similar, dry needling is based on Western medicine and is evidence-based, while acupuncture is based on traditional Eastern medicine.

Relief

Once you begin treatment at one of our Denver facilities, it will be common for your headaches to go away before your neck pain does. Don’t worry--all treatment is a process. Suboccipitals respond very well to treatment, helping headaches to resolve quickly. What a relief!

If you’ve been in an auto accident and are struggling with tension headaches, you don’t have to keep suffering! Using functional dry needling and a combination of therapies to best suit your symptoms, our auto accident chiropractors will help you achieve results as quickly as possible. Contact our office today.

Treating Acute Injuries

acchealth - 09/19/2022 - Acupuncture / Chiropractic Care / Dry Needling / Graston Technique / Health and Wellness / Pain Management / Paying for Healthcare - 0 Comments

We’ve all been there. One moment you’re perfectly fine and then the next….BOOM! Something in your body doesn’t feel right. Maybe you tripped and fell while running, maybe you collided with another player while playing ultimate frisbee, maybe you were at work and twisted around suddenly when someone called your name. Whatever happened, you suffered what is called an acute injury.

What Are Acute Injuries?

An acute injury (often called sports injury) is trauma to your musculoskeletal system. In other words, when you hurt or otherwise damage your bones, muscles, and the soft tissues that hold everything together (ligaments, cartilage, tendons, etc). These usually happen suddenly from actions like falling, twisting, jumping, throwing, and running.

Don’t confuse acute injuries with chronic injuries. Acute injuries happen suddenly, while chronic injuries develop over time as a certain part of the body gathers strain from repetitive overuse.

Here are some common acute injuries:

Broken bones
Dislocations
Shin splints
Sprains
Bursitis
Torn ligaments
Muscle pulls

What Helps Provide the Best Recovery?

Often, less-serious acute injuries can be treated with the RICE method:

Rest
Ice
Compression
Elevation

These actions work together to reduce swelling and inflammation so you can heal. However, the process can be slow, painful, and frustrating--especially if it's keeping you from returning to work or participating in your favorite sports.

How Can An Accident and Injury Chiropractor Help Acute Injuries?

Here at Accelerate Health, our mission is to get you back to the activities you love faster. That’s why we offer many therapeutic services that can help speed up your recovery and quickly help you reduce swelling, inflammation, bruising, and pain.

Let’s use an example of an ankle sprain. If you fell and twisted your ankle while playing soccer, you’d likely want to get past the painful swelling and bruising as soon as possible, so you could get back out on the field. Here’s what your care would look like if you came into one of our Denver offices.

Diagnosis

After initial evaluation and examination of your ankle, we would give you a diagnosis of an inversion ankle sprain (your ankle was injured by rolling inward) and begin treatment immediately.

Phase 1: Acute

In the acute phase, reducing swelling, inflammation, and pain would be the primary focus.

To help you increase your range of motion, we would begin with light soft tissue mobility work around the damaged ligament to bring in new blood flow and to push inflammatory fluid out of the area. We would start with the Graston Technique, using special stainless steel tools to stretch and rearrange your soft tissue to increase blood flow and promote the healing process.

Next, we would use cold laser therapy. Our class IV cold laser penetrates deep into the tissue and creates a chemical reaction within the cell. As a result the cell is stimulated to create more ATP. Why is this important? ATP is used as energy in the body, so more ATP will increase the amount of energy our body can use to heal. We’ve seen cold laser therapy significantly reduce bruising almost immediately.

Finally, we would perform kinesiotaping around your ankle to reduce pain and swelling. Our doctors love to use RockTape--an advanced kinesiotaping system that stabilizes your injury while still leaving range of motion and space for your blood to flow freely.

This acute phase would last 3-4 visits or roughly 2-3 weeks. We’d also give you exercises to do at home to promote your healing. (One of our favorites is writing the ABCs with your ankle!)

Phase 2: Subacute

Once you are out of the acute phase, you would enter the subacute phase. This phase of care would be focused on function and helping you to fully bear weight on your injured ankle. To do this, we’d draw upon lots of different techniques and tools, customizing your treatment to what your body would benefit most from.

Here’s some of the techniques we might use:

Graston Method: manipulating the muscle and connective tissue with specialized tools to increase bloodflow, reduce scar tissue, and increase mobility

Active Release Technique: a series of muscle movements and releases to increase mobility and reduce pain.

Voodoo Flossing: wrapping and releasing injured areas to promote blood flow and healing

Cupping: creating a vacuum over the injured area with special silicone cups to help with pain, inflammation, and blow flow

Dry Needling: inserting thin, monofilament needles into trigger points around the injury to reduce pain and increase range of motion.

A combination of these techniques is the gold standard of care. At this point we would be addressing the musculature surrounding the injured ligament to help provide better support and stability to the ligament. During this phase you would have new exercises to work on at home to help further increase the stability of your ankle.

Phase 3: Prevention

After you fully heal from your ankle sprain, you would, of course, want to prevent it from happening again. That’s why we work to educate you after your recovery on the best way to protect yourself from further injury.

In addition to teaching you safer ways to move, stretch, and warm up, we also encourage you to keep visiting our office to ensure you stay in tip-top shape.

In conclusion

Acute injuries are never fun, but here at Accelerate Health, we’re committed to helping you recover quickly with proven, non-invasive treatments that will get back to doing what you love. If you’re struggling with an injury--old or new--make an appointment today and get back on the path to health and happiness.