Disc Injuries
Herniated Disc Injuries and Car Accidents
Car accidents are one of the leading causes of disc injuries in the neck and lower back. It takes an injury specialist, an orthopedist, and or a neurologist to identify and diagnose herniated or bulging disc injuries.
It is important to understand that most emergency room doctors, family doctors, and family chiropractors do not invest the time or have the expertise to identify a patient’s disc injury after an accident. Timely diagnosis and treatment of disc injuries is very important. Untreated bulging or herniated disc injuries manifest into lifelong pain, numbness, and tingling in the extremities, loss of muscle strength, and even more advanced neuromusculoskeletal deficits and permanent disabilities.
You must understand that it is common to have a serious disc injury and not have any aches and pains. Don’t assume that because you don’t have a lot of pain, your discs are not herniated or bulging.
Furthermore, state and federal laws are in place to protect victims of disc injuries caused by car accidents. In addition, insurance companies take herniated and bulging disc injuries very seriously. And have assigned high cash values for pain and suffering for cases involving herniated or bulging discs caused by auto collisions.
What are bulging and herniated discs, and how are they caused by car accidents?
Simply put, spinal discs are like little pillows that are set between each vertebra in your spine. These discs are very important because they help absorb shock as you move about in your everyday life. It might help to think about spinal discs like jelly doughnuts, since they have a shell-type barrier that covers a liquid substance. Physical trauma, like the kind suffered during a car accident, can cause the disc to bulge or even rupture and let the “jelly” to bulge or even ooze out of it (herniation). At this point, it is not uncommon for the disc to shift and hit a nerve in the spinal column.
When a nerve is pinched in such a way that it causes this kind of “radicular” pain, many patients feel as if bouts of pain are shooting through the body to one specific area. Depending on the location of the bulging or herniated disc in question, this pain can be located in the leg, the arm, or other places.
However, the pain you feel as a result of disc injury may not be located in the spine—it can “radiate” to other parts of the body, depending on the particular disc that has been impacted. It is also common to have numbness running down the buttocks through the back of the thigh and into the foot when the damage is in the lower back, and into the arm, forearm, hands, and fingers when the damage is in the neck.
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