What Causes Back Pain and Whiplash

Experiencing pain in the body is normal and is pretty common for all people. Pain is either felt through time or through incidents that a person experiences.  Some of the pain people experience is caused by their daily activities and some of them are activities that no one would expect to cause such pain after a long time of doing it. It’s those kinds of pain that will bother someone to the point that it would cause a big problem in the future.

Back pain is something that a lot of people encounter. For countries that are inhabited by busy people like Singapore, back pain is not something that is not unheard of. There are two types of back pain that people may experience; Acute back pain and chronic back pain. Acute back pain refers to the pain that is felt at the lower back that only lasts for a limited time like less than three months. Chronic back pain is the pain that is felt that lasts for more than three months. The pain affects the neck and the lower back and sometimes can affect the legs and the arms.

A lot of people, especially those who spend most of their time looking at a monitor of a computer or at their phone will eventually experience back pain. Hunching back and looking down at these devices will help a person develop back pain if they continue to do this for a long time. There are a lot of possible reasons for a person to experience back pain. Some of them are the straining of the muscles or ligaments at the back, pressure at the inter-vertebral disks, nerve compression or entrapment or damage to the vertebra or the spine. 

Back pain is something that could be remedied. The curing process starts through the correct diagnosis of what kind of back pain a person is experiences and what causes it. Correctly diagnosing it determines how the problem will be solved. 

Speaking of pain to the neck, whiplash is a word that is not far from the topic of neck pain. Whiplash is the term used to call the sudden acceleration and deceleration force at the neck. This mostly happens when the person experiences a motor cycle accident or something similar. What happens is that the neck is bent forward or the head faces down after a sudden stop and after that, the neck is bent backward or the head tilts back after a sudden acceleration. When this happens, injuries to the nerve roots, ligaments, muscles, tendons and neck muscles may be experienced.

Whiplash has different severities depending on how much pain is felt. 

1. Grade 0 – No pain or discomfort is felt and there are no physical signs of injury.
2. Grade 1 – There is neck pain, tenderness and stiffness but there is no physical sign of an injury.
3. Grade 2 – There is neck pain, stiffness and tenderness and there are some physical signs of injury such as point of tenderness and having the difficulty of turning the head.
4. Grade 3 – Pain is felt and there are neurological injuries present such as changes to the reflexes and weakness is felt to the arms.
5. Grade 5 – There is pain, fracture to the neck or even dislocation. 

There are symptoms to whiplash and they are dizziness, headache, pain to the shoulder and arms, altered sensations, pins and needles, numbness of the arms, weakness, visual and auditory symptoms, difficulty in swallowing and difficulty in concentrating. Whiplash is treatable and the first step to treating it finding out what causes the pain.

Whiplash, back pain and neck pain is common but it is something that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. If pain is felt in any of these parts, consult your doctor as soon as possible.