What Causes Chronic Pain After Auto Injury?

If you’re asking this question, you may have noticed that before your car accident, you didn’t have chronic pain and weren’t so sensitive to touch. Then the auto injury you suffered changed your entire life. You’re in pain now most of the time. You can’t do normal everyday tasks or even simple things like your own laundry without pain. You have to rearrange your schedule to see your Depew chiropractor every few days. The treatments from Dr. Palmer are making a difference, but you still wonder why so much pain?

After a car accident, a certain percentage of people will find themselves in a state of chronic pain. The pain is everywhere in their body and not just at the site of the auto injury. It can be perplexing.

The reason why this happens is because of a condition called central sensitization. In an auto injury where your back is hurt, your nerves perceive the injury and send a message to the brain that there’s been an injury. Your brain responds appropriately by causing pain and contracting muscles around the site of the injury to prevent further damage. Another result is that cells are sent in to start repairing the damage.

Central sensitization causes the nerves that perceive pain become hypersensitive and start reacting to small stimuli with a big response. The nerves are actually changed themselves and their own functions, firing at the least little stimulus.

It’s a real situation, not one you are imagining – but isn't unbeatable. As you continue seeing the Depew chiropractor, Dr. Palmer, his spinal adjustments will become the correct stimuli to connect the nerves with the brain’s proper perception of pain. That’s the beauty of chiropractic. You’re right where you should be when you’re in his chiropractic office in Depew.

Reference

Latremoliere, A. and Woolf, C.J. Central sensitization: a generator of pain hypersensitivity by central neural plasticity. J Pain 2009 Sep;10(9):895-926.