By Dr. Emil Tompkins, a Tucson family chiropractor with a passion for family health and wellness.
Have you ever been in an auto accident? Many times you don’t know what’s coming, or maybe you did see it coming and you knew you couldn’t do anything about it. It’s stressful, it’s painful. And there’s never a time where we can look upon our accidents fondly.
But if you ever do get into that situation, there are a few steps that you can take to make sure that your accident doesn’t create a lifetime of pain and suffering.
So here are the 6 Steps to Follow After An Auto Accident
- Stop assess the situation around you, make sure that you’re safe and the people around you are safe.
- Pay attention to how you feel: you may not feel pain at the moment of the accident, in fact, most people feel most of their pain within 72 hours of the accident.
- It’s okay to go to the emergency room. I know some of my audience tends to shy away from medical intervention but the emergency room can make sure that there are no life-threatening problems, fractures and other issues that could make this a permanent injury.
Auto The only potential drawback to an emergency room visit is that there is a possibility that they are only looking for things like fractures, dislocations, and bleeds. Anything else may be missed or deemed unimportant. However, that could lead to long-term consequences if you don’t take care of it.
Get a structural evaluation fast. A Structural chiropractor can evaluate you and make sure that the trauma of the accident didn’t create change in your spinal structure. Only the chiropractor is able to understand the relationship between the nerves, blood vessels, muscles and bones that make up the area and how the mechanics of an auto accident can affect that. The quicker someone evaluates you and helps you to heal, the faster you feel better. I have seen people recover from their accidents within a couple of days to weeks and some have taken years. Get it handled quickly so that you feel better quickly
- Be honest with your insurance company. These days, the commercials that tell you “get in a wreck, get a check” has caused a small percentage of people to make up pain in order to receive some kind of compensation. Realize that is all comes back to you eventually. And the problems you have later aren’t worth a few bucks. Always be honest.
- On the other hand, being honest also means, don’t minimize your pain. If in your conversation with the insurance company you tell them that you feel pretty good, when in fact, you’ve had a small headache every day since the accident could mean that you don’t get the healthcare you need. And that’s not okay.
Getting into an auto accident is never fun. But there’s no reason you have to suffer forever, follow the 6 steps that I’ve outlined today and we’ll see you on the other side much healthier.
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