After an accident, you might initially think you’re fine and that there wasn’t a significant injury. But sometimes, headaches, neck trouble, and tingling sensations in your hands and feet can crop up days or even weeks after the event. An accident injury can be tricky to heal from, but a comprehensive rehab program can help. Here at B3 Medical in Riverview, FL, we use several innovative ways to address your problems.
Since there are many types of accidents, everyone will have a different recovery experience. While some people might truly only suffer from surface-level injuries, others could be out of action for months or years. The more traumatic the injury, the more treatment you should receive to maximize your function and get you back to feeling your old self as soon as possible.
How Long Does Accident Injury Rehab Take?
The time it takes to recover from an injury is very individual. There are numerous conditions, which all involve very different healing processes. For example, you might have injured your muscles, ligaments, or tendons, or you could have even broken a bone. After car accidents, many people suffer from whiplash, which can affect the way they function in their day-to-day lives.
Aside from the type of injury you have, there are several other factors that can affect your recovery. In particular, you shouldn’t rely on time alone to heal you, and you should instead get in touch with a competent doctor who specializes in sports injuries. That way, you can benefit from groundbreaking treatments, learn what movements or activities to avoid, and find out more about how your lifestyle can support your recovery.
Muscular Injuries
Many types of incidents can cause muscle strain. For example, you might have been trying to lift something heavy and twist at the same time, which can affect the muscles in your back. Or else, you could have twisted your ankle while running. If only your muscles are affected, you can expect a swift recovery. Many people start to feel better after around three to six weeks, and they can start to play sports again one or two months after the injury occurred.
Depending on the exact injury and the reason why it happened, patients with muscle strains could benefit from massage and physiotherapy. A good physiotherapist can let them know whether there are any postural problems that contributed to the issue. Then, the patient can learn how to resolve them and prevent any further injuries in the future.
Ligaments and Tendons
While muscular injuries heal relatively quickly, ligaments and tendons benefit from a lot less blood flow, so they will take several months to completely heal. For example, if you’ve ruptured your Achilles tendon, you will most likely have to wear a boot for many weeks, and in severe cases, you might even have to undergo surgery.
By getting in touch with a specialist as soon as you can, you’ll have the necessary resources to minimize the impact of your injury on your life. You could gain access to a number of treatments, such as regenerative medicine, which significantly reduce the time you spend injured and help you regain your mobility weeks earlier than you otherwise would.
Broken Bones
Most simple fractures will heal within 6-8 weeks, although it pays off to be careful and start exercising again slowly at the end of this time. However, it all depends on which bone you have broken and how. If it’s your tibia, you might have to wait for twenty weeks until you can be active again, whereas a wrist fracture could heal in a month.
Your sports injury specialist can assess your current state and perform imaging studies to find out more about the injury. Then, they can help you figure out a way forward and suggest some treatments that could help you recover fully.
Whiplash
People who have been in a car accident often suffer from whiplash, which is caused by a sudden movement of the head, such as the one from a collision. The condition can cause headaches, pain in the neck and shoulders, and difficulties moving the head left and right. In severe cases, the pain can debilitate you and prevent you from going to work and completing your daily tasks.
Fortunately, you can expect to feel better within two to three months, especially if you take good care of yourself. One particularly successful treatment for whiplash here at the clinic is chiropractic care, which involves manipulating the bones, muscles, and joints that are contributing to the problem.
What Can You Do to Speed Up Healing?
As you can see, there are many factors that affect how long it will take you to recover fully from accident injury. While many smaller issues can be resolved in a few months, some conditions will affect you for the rest of your life. Fortunately, there are rehab doctors who specialize in injury treatment. Such professionals will help you develop a comprehensive recovery plan that allows you to recover quickly. Let’s go through some of our most popular treatments.
Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative treatments are an innovative branch of medicine that involves using your body’s own healing powers to speed up recovery. They have been used on many athletes who wanted to get back to the playing field as quickly as possible.
To get started, we might extract certain components from your blood and inject or apply them to the site of your injury. Once there, they will produce many new and healthy cells and encourage the breakdown of your injured tissue. One of the main benefits of this type of medicine is that your own cells are used, so there is very little risk of rejection or problems.
Physical Therapy
Physiotherapy has been a cornerstone of injury recovery for many decades, and for good reason. The highly competent physiotherapists at our clinic will take a holistic approach and assess your whole body. That way, they can discover whether there are any postural issues that have contributed to your injury. You can then start to work on these imbalances to resolve your current problem and reduce the chance of getting hurt again in the future.
Massage
When you’re in pain, your tissues tighten up. This can be counterproductive for healing, so a relaxing massage can be very beneficial. What’s more, it will stimulate the blood flow to your injured area, which encourages the production of fresh cells. In this way, a massage can support the process of regenerative medicine and further increase the number of healing agents in your injured tissue.
When you’ve had an accident injury, you’ll want to do everything you can to get better as quickly as possible. Although not all injuries are equally severe, you are likely to suffer from the consequences of an incident for several weeks at least. Certain problems can affect you for the rest of your life, especially if you don’t get them treated quickly enough.
A great rehab doctor can assess your current condition and suggest the most effective treatments. These might involve regenerative medicine, physical therapy, and massage. In most cases, the patient will do best with a combination of methods. Get in touch with us now at B3 Medical in Riverview, FL and book a consultation with our certified sports physician, Dr. Timothy Bain.
