A Little Kink In The Neck

One of the most important principles in understanding health and your body is; that every effect has a cause and every cause, an effect. Pretty obvious, you might say. One cannot exist without the other, but when it comes to our health we seem too often to forget this basic principle and assume that health is a matter of good luck. We overlook or don't understand the causal linkage between events so we assume they are totally separate and distinct from each other. When we or our loved ones have an accident or suffer a trauma, how often does our criteria for whether we need to do anything about it sound like this: "Is it broken or bleeding?" If it isn’t we assume we have got through the episode unscathed and proceed on with life. Is this the most wise approach? A piece of research published recently showed that people who suffer a whiplash injury have more health problems later on through life.

The paper, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Vol. 54, (2001), pg. 851-856, was entitled, “The association between exposure to a rear-end collision and future health complaints.” It was produced by Anita Berglund, Lars Alfredsson, Irene Jensen, David Cassidy and Ake Nygren.

The researchers wanted to better understand the association between spinal injury and a person’s health .They investigated 232 people involved in rear-end collisions who had whiplash and 204 people involved in rear-end collisions
who didn’t report whiplash 7 years after the accident. The people who suffered whiplash had more headaches, thoracic pain and low back pain. They also suffered more fatigue, sleep disturbances and ill health of all kinds. As the researchers were looking from a medical viewpoint, they didn’t follow a third group who had sustained whiplash and had their subluxations corrected on an ongoing basis over the study period. It's a great pity. The subluxation complex is a relentless and progressive process that may take many years to result in symptoms. It is often the events that we encounter in our early life that compound and progress until one day we “come down with something” or“catch” something infectious, or we are unlucky enough to “have” or “get” a serious disease and never make the connection to the cause. Every effect has a cause. Every cause has an effect. So much for a little "kink in the neck."