A car accident has the potential to cause immense trauma and distress to all parties involved. The confusion in the aftermath of any car accident can leave you perplexed over what exactly you should do and how you should do it.
Luckily, you are not alone. While it is disheartening to know that car accidents happens often, the frequency of confusion over what to do after an accident has given insight over the best course of action to take in the aftermath of an accident.
Should you find yourself in an accident be sure to take the following steps.
- Remain calm
- Get out of danger to safe location
- Call 911
- Check on any passengers in your vehicle
- Take pictures of all property damage
- Take pictures of any injuries you or your passengers sustained
- Exchange driver’s information through the police officer
What Should I Do Next After a Car Accident?
Emergency Room vs Urgent Care
After a car accident it is imperative that you seek medical care as soon as possible. This important task is often accompanied by the question of where exactly should someone seek medical care.
Depending on the severity of your injuries, an urgent care facility or hospital emergency room may be more suited to your needs although most find the benefits of urgent care over an ER more appealing. Such benefits include:
- Urgent care is usually significantly cheaper than emergency rooms. An urgent care facility treatment that would cost several hundred dollars could easily cost thousands at a hospital ER.
- Urgent care facilities have employees that are as trained or experienced as ER staff.
- In an ER, you most likely will be seen by a nurse practitioners and not a doctor. Hospitals are utilizing nurse practitioners more commonly due to the fact that it’s a lot cheaper since nurses practitioners can perform many of the same duties as a doctor at a fraction of the cost.
- Hospitals are a business and are driven by the bottom line, not patient care or successful outcomes.
- Urgent care usually has a doctor on staff.
- Urgent care usually has a quicker wait time compared to an ER that can take hours.
Where Should I go for Further Treatment for Car Accident Injuries?
Other common places to seek further medical care after sustaining an injury in a car accident include:
- Chiropractic Clinics
- Physical Therapy Clinics
- Orthopedic Surgeon Centers
- Hospital Rehab Centers
Chiropractic Care – What is it all about?
People seeking back pain relief alternatives often will look to chiropractic options for help. About 22 million Americans visit chiropractors annually. Of these, 35% seek relief from back pain due to various causes like car accidents, sports injuries, and muscle strains. Chiropractors can also help with injuries and pain in the neck, arms, legs, and with other issues such as headaches.
What is Chiropractic Care?
Chiropractors use hands-on spinal manipulation and other alternative treatments to treat pain and injuries. The theory behind chiropractic treatment is that proper alignment of the body’s musculoskeletal structure, particularly the spine, will enable the body to heal itself without surgery or medication (or with limited amounts of these less safe options).
Hands-on manipulation is used to restore mobility to joints restricted by tissue injury caused by a traumatic event, such as a car accident.
Chiropractic treatment is primarily used as a pain relief alternative for muscles, joints, bones, and connective tissue, such as cartilage, ligaments, and tendons. It is sometimes used in conjunction with conventional medical treatment.
Chiropractic care has become so popular that hospitals have recently begun promoting treatment of auto accidents injuries with their own chiropractic facilities.
Physical Therapy Clinics – What do they do?
Your doctor might suggest this type of treatment if you’ve had an injury or illness that makes it hard to do daily tasks. Physical therapy (sometimes shortened to PT) is care that aims to ease pain and help you function, move, and live better. You may need it to:
- Relieve pain
- Improve movement or ability
- Recover from a sports injury
- Prevent disability or surgery
- Rehab after a stroke, accident, injury, or surgery
- Manage a chronic illness like diabetes, heart disease, or arthritis
- Recover after giving birth
- Adapt to an artificial limb
- Learn to use assistive devices like a walker or cane
The Negatives of Orthopedic Group Treatment
Historically, a treatment center would refer a patient to an orthopedic specialist for evaluation; however, today they seem to want to run the entire process. Is this a good or bad process? Well looking through the eyes of the insurance company and opposing counsel, it doesn’t look good.
In fact, it could hurt your auto accident legal case. Why? Because the opinions offered will be clearly biased to support whatever findings and treatments they determine medically necessary. With more people looking at what they can get, it muddies the water of what’s the right thing to be done for the patient.
The key is to be objective and document all clinical findings. If someone isn’t a specialist, they may be leaving out important information that could negatively affect your case. In the medical and legal fields, if it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen.
The Ideal Accident Injury Care Clinic
The most effective type of clinic would be an integrative clinic. It would include skills and knowledge from many specialized medical fields. That way each patient is getting a complete and effective approach for the treatment of their injuries. Orthopedists and hospitals will try to incorporate things from both disciplines but with a higher cost.
How Long Can Treatment With Kingdom Chiropractic Take?
- Treatment timelines with Kingdom Chiropractic can vary from issue to issue.
- At Kingdom Chiropractic, we like to get everyone seen for an EMC exam within the first 14 days after an accident. Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t a requirement. We simply prefer to do things as early as possible in our clinics.
- Visit frequency depends entirely on the patient’s injuries and needs. It can range from one to four times a week. Each person heals differently.
- It’s a good idea to get radiology done early on in your case, especially if your symptoms aren’t subsiding at a normal pace. Usually we will order radiology in the first 30 days post-accident. This gives the body a chance to heal and for the inflammation to subside a bit which allows for better imaging.
If your accident injuries have left you with pain that has become difficult to manage then don’t hesitate to contact Kingdom Chiropractic about starting treatment.
You can reach us by:
Phone: 813-434-1045
Email: info[at]kingdomchiropractic.com
Or through our Contact Form
