Whiplash Injury of the Cervical Spine

A blow from behind. A jolt. In milliseconds your head is thrown forward and back again, and your neck makes a movement it was not built for. The accident is over before you grasp what has happened. But your body has stored every fraction of that second.

Then the pain comes. Not always immediately — often only hours later, sometimes the next day. The neck becomes stiff as a board. Turning hurts, lowering the chin hurts, looking over the shoulder hurts. Headaches that draw from the back of the skull toward the front. Dizziness, nausea, the feeling that something in the skull is no longer in its place. Sometimes it stays at a few days. Sometimes it becomes a months-long, years-long story — a neck that finds no rest, even though the imaging has long since shown nothing.