When you’re navigating a Florida rideshare accident claim, you’ll have to deal with your medical issues at the same time as the legal stuff. Cuts, scrapes, and bruises are all minor and hopefully the only injuries you got, but they really aren’t. One of the most important parts of the human body is also incredibly sensitive and easy to harm: the neck.
Luckily, even in bad situations, most of the injuries you’ll get are simple to treat and require no intervention from medical professionals. Below, you’ll find information on the most common neck pains and how to soothe them. It will hopefully help you when you’ve been in an accident recently or not.
Stiffness
A stiff neck has many causes, from stress to bad posture. Stress tenses your muscles and causes them to rest in unnatural positions. For example, raised shoulders and a clenched jaw are common stress responses, and both are directly connected to the neck. Relaxing both of these areas will likely help your neck muscles obese as well.
Reducing your stress levels and noticing and correcting overly tense posture is one way to help prevent a stiff neck. As for treating it, it’s not too different from a crick: massages, hot or cold compresses and stretches are all ways to treat your stiff neck right now. To prevent it, adjust the things around you like desks to encourage good posture, relax more and consider adjusting your pillows.
Muscle Knots
While you can get muscle knots anywhere, ones that appear in your neck can be extra painful and irritating. You can’t see them most of the time and they can be difficult to treat if you don’t realize they’ve formed.
There are quite a few things that can be done, though many lead with over-the-counter painkillers. These will ease the pain but can’t treat the root cause. You’ll need to start treating them right away.
As soon as you realize you have a muscle knot, treat it with a heating pad. You can take it off after twenty minutes and then replace it with a cold compress. Doing this a few times a day in between exercises, stretches and massages will all slowly help the muscles untense. Sometimes, though, these don’t work.
Applying a magnesium cream to the knot is the best first response in this case as magnesium is a natural muscle relaxant. This will relax the muscle causing the knot and make other treatments more effective.
Herniated Disc
Herniated discs are incredibly painful and sound really bad: the disc that sits between two of your vertebrae will have slipped a bit and be poking the nerves and things in the spinal canal. This injury can be serious if left untreated. However, the treatments tend to be pretty simple and not intrusive.
Most of the time, some rest and anti-inflammatory medicine is all it takes for the disc to return to its original position. Combine this with physical therapy to relax spasming muscles and your neck will be back to normal in no time. Sometimes, a steroid may be injected into the area around a herniated disc as well.
When all of this fails, then surgery is the only option. When this is deemed necessary, you’ll likely receive a procedure that removes the disc, fuses the affected vertebrae together and then a metal plate is used to help aid a bone graft. This surgery has some long-term consequences and is done as sparingly as possible as a result.
Whiplash
You’ll experience the symptoms of whiplash when your neck is forcefully moved forward and backward too quickly. Sudden falls and crashes are some of the ways this can happen. It results in neck stiffness, since many muscles will have been strained, pain, and your range of motion being temporarily decreased.
Muscle relaxants, rest, and warm and cold compresses are all easy to treat your strained muscles.
Bear in mind that too much bed rest will create more problems instead of easing them, so only rest for one or two days. If the pain is too much, a doctor might temporarily numb some of the muscles or provide prescription medicines to ease it.
In these cases, you’ll probably want to either seek out a physical therapist or research some simple neck exercises you can do at home. Remember to take breaks to let your muscles heal themselves and relax or you’ll end up with other pains like muscle knots.
Facet Joint Syndrome
Facet joint syndrome is when the joints of your spine hurt after being worn down naturally through use. As expected, there is no cure. Luckily, there are many methods to control and ease the pain it creates, though.
One massive part of treatment is posture correction, as expected for a neck ailment. Exercising and supportive braces are also good options when paired with heat and cold therapy. Medicines like creams or pills and steroid injections are also options that can provide extra life as you start your physical therapy journey.
When this doesn’t ease the pain, then nerve-blocking treatments or even surgery may be required. Hopefully, though, the less strenuous home remedies provide enough relief to render these last two options unnecessary.
Arthritis
Unfortunately, there is no cure for spinal arthritis. This condition can cause pain and stiffness in your neck that muscle treatments can’t touch. The treatments aren’t necessarily minor either: lifestyle changes and physical therapy paired with anti-inflammatory or even pain medication are the typical treatments.
While they may help some people, they may not do much or eventually stop being effective. When this happens, your doctor may suggest surgery. While it can be effective and solve most of your issues, it still carries risks that both you and every doctor involved will have to weigh before it can begin.
