By Winston Lee L. Ac, Ph.D., KMD
In general, American life starts with driving a car and ends up with a car again. You and other people turn on the engine in the morning to go to your office or school, stop by a grocery store, and load something. On the contrary, in most parts of Asia, people usually take a bus or subway to get to their workplace. Americans are using the automobile way more than other countries in the world, and accordingly, they are exposed to car accidents more than any other country. We need to pay attention to this fact and study for effective treatment with our Eastern Medicine.
Interestingly enough, the vast majority of the car accident patients are suffering from the neck injury. It’s not just limited to the cases in the US. Even in Europe and Asia, most of the car accident patients have neck pain. We can guess that the impact of the accident does not go only toward the neck. Then why?
We can figure out the reason through simulating the procedure of the accident. This accident is not a direct impact by a particular object or human body. The victim is in the car, and he or she gets acceleration of the sudden movement of the vehicle. In other words, it’s an aftermath of an indirect and secondary impact. The most common injury happens when the patient gets involved in a rear hit accident. By this rear-end hit case, the car seat moves forward quickly, and the human’s neck flips backward and forward in 0.1 second. When the head goes ahead, the injury of the neck muscle takes place. The procedure of the damage is called the notorious ‘Whiplash Injury.’ The bunch of different muscles, such as the trapezius, capitis, levator scapulae, and scalene, are extended in a short period, and consequently, it causes severe injury in the muscle fiber. Just imagine a fisherman pulls back a rod and throws it away.
Another distinction of this accident is that there is not that much pain on the day. If you got hit by a baseball today, you might have pain and bruise today, and it’ll be better later. But car accident patients state that the pain is worse on the next day and gets worse up to 2~3 days sometimes. And it’s better a few days later.
Plus, the pain does not stay on one site. It can travel all the body from head to toe. Scientists say that the healing process of indirect impact kicks in the next day and the patient could feel more pain on the following day. Any pain means that the patient is alive, and the recovery is turned on.
We can treat the patient with acupuncture effectively rather than just prescribing painkiller – Advil or Tylenol. Pain killers are only covering the pain for a while, and it just blocks the neurotransmission from muscle to brain. With acupuncture, it can stimulate the muscle fiber(Ashi points), which is located in a deep tissue area without causing collateral physical damage to other tissue and biological damage to the liver or kidney. We can expect that the recovery of muscle injury is to be faster than the control group. The minor injury in the muscle by acupuncture treatment triggers the healing process effectively without other side effects from chemical pain pills. Also, we can use different acupoints that are known for points of pain control, such as LI 4 or ST36 simultaneously. In my case, I usually apply sports taping to support the muscles and ligaments and prescribe premade herbal medicine to remove residual inflammatory fluid along with acupuncture treatment.
