Personal Injury Treatment in Suwanee
You can be injured in many ways – car accidents, playing sports, slipping and falling – and often, these injuries leave you in a lot of pain. It can be surprisingly difficult to get treatment after an injury, especially if your pain doesn’t improve. Many doctors are good at treating easily diagnosed problems – if you have a broken bone, they put a cast on it; if you’re bleeding, they give you stitches.
But when it comes to pain that lasts more than a few days after a personal injury, diagnosis and treatment are often more challenging. Not all injuries are easy to see on an X-ray, and some injuries may cause multiple problems that lead to pain. General practitioners or urgent care doctors aren’t equipped for long-term pain management. Their options for treating pain are limited to over-the-counter or prescription medications that may have unpleasant side effects or, in some cases, risky surgeries.
Are There Other Options for Personal Injury Treatment in Suwanee?
Yes. If you’re dealing with pain or other symptoms after a personal injury, we recommend visiting a chiropractic clinic like Optimum Health Rehab. In addition to chiropractic care, we also offer physical rehabilitation, massage therapy, neurologic services, and other treatments for multiple kinds of pain. Our practitioners are skilled in diagnosing and treating pain and ready to help you feel better.
When Should You See a Chiropractor After a Personal Injury?
Ideally, as soon as possible, for two reasons: First, early intervention after an accident can make it easier to treat pain, and you’ll feel improvement sooner. Second, waiting to get treatment can make it more difficult to seek reimbursement from the at-fault party or their insurance carrier.
For example, we often see patients injured in car accidents, and typically the at-fault driver is expected to cover medical costs. In most cases, this responsibility falls to their auto insurance, which is supposed to pay up to the policy limit for bodily injuries in an accident. Of course, insurance companies make more money when they find reasons not to pay claims, so they will look for any excuse to avoid paying your medical bills. One frequent reason for claim denials is that the patient delayed seeking treatment after the accident, and now the insurance company believes their injuries are either made up or caused by something other than the accident.
Unfortunately, this situation is common because many patients don’t realize they’re injured right away after an accident. The rush of adrenaline after a crash can suppress pain, or you might feel worse once your body starts trying to heal the injury and swelling occurs. For these reasons, people often don’t realize they’re hurt, or they might think their injuries are too minor to need medical care. They wait a few days or weeks, realize their pain isn’t going away, and make an appointment with a doctor. At this point, the insurance company decides their injuries have nothing to do with the car accident, or they would have gotten treatment sooner.
Situations like this are frustrating, although a skilled personal injury lawyer may be able to help you get compensation anyway. However, the best approach is to see a healthcare provider right away after an accident, even if you don’t think your injuries are serious.
If you did see a doctor after your injury, keep track of when they said you could expect to feel better. With soft-tissue injuries like strains, sprains, or whiplash, the doctor will usually say that you might feel better anywhere from a few days to a few weeks later. If you’re nearing the end of this time frame and haven’t seen much improvement, please make an appointment with a chiropractor so you can address the root causes of your pain.
What Treatments Are Available for Personal Injuries in Suwanee?
The ideal treatment depends on your injuries, and many people benefit from multiple treatments. Here are some of our most popular services:
Chiropractic Care
Pain following an accident can have many causes, but one common issue is spinal misalignment, also known as vertebral subluxation. This means that one (or more) of the 33 vertebrae comprising your spine has been pulled out of alignment with the others. Misalignment can lead to pain, discomfort, stiffness, and other symptoms. Subluxations might happen for many reasons, from sleeping at an odd angle to straining your back while lifting a heavy object. Still, they frequently occur after accidents, as any harsh impact can be jarring to the spine.
An experienced chiropractor can locate these misaligned vertebrae and perform a chiropractic adjustment or spinal manipulation. This is a quick procedure in which we apply a sudden, controlled force to guide the vertebrae back into place. Usually, it only takes a few seconds, and the process isn’t painful.
Physical Therapy
Physical therapy is often an integral part of recovery after an injury. It serves multiple purposes – reducing pain and inflammation, taking stress off injured areas or compressed nerves, strengthening muscles and joints around the injury, reducing the risk of further damage, and helping the patient recover lost function.
A physical therapist will review your medical history, imaging, and diagnosis, as well as any notes from your chiropractor (both treatments may be used together). Next, they might want to evaluate how you’re doing and what you need to work on. They may ask you to do a series of simple exercises or tasks, like standing up from a chair or bending to touch your toes. Don’t worry if you can’t do the exercise – the point is to learn what you’re having difficulty with so the therapist can create a plan to help you.
After the evaluation, your therapist may prescribe one or more of several therapies. Frequently they will guide you through exercises to strengthen the muscles and improve flexibility. Stretching with resistance may also be beneficial. Additionally, your therapist may use heat or cold therapy or electrical stimulation as needed. They will also give you “homework” or exercises to work on when you don’t have a therapy session. Following the instructions and doing the work as indicated will help you get better much faster.
Massage Therapy
Sometimes people are surprised to learn that massage therapy can be a part of personal injury treatment, as they might think it’s only used for relaxation. But massage therapy also plays an important role in healing by improving circulation and reducing stress and muscle tension.
Neurologic Services
Subluxations and muscle injuries account for many injuries with lingering pain, but in some cases, you may also have nerve pain or damage. Nerve injuries are easy to overlook because they may happen at the same time as other, more obvious injuries, such as muscle tears or misaligned vertebrae. Your doctor may treat the initial injury and assume that will take care of your pain, but if you have nerve damage, the pain could continue long after the injury you were first diagnosed with has healed.
At Optimum Health Rehab, we can perform nerve conduction studies to determine if your nerves are responding atypically. If so, there are several therapies we might try:
- Removing pressure from the nerve. Sometimes the problem originates with a bone or scar tissue compressing or pinching the nerve. If this is the case, we may be able to relieve the pressure with a chiropractic adjustment or physical therapy to take the stress off the nerve.
- Regenerative therapies. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections can be effective at healing nerve damage in some cases. These are done in one appointment, where we draw your blood, filter out the PRP, then inject this concentrated source of growth hormones and healing compounds into the area around the nerve.
- Electrical stimulation. This treatment uses a device like a TENS unit to treat your symptoms with low-voltage electrical currents. These may stimulate the nerve or return sensation if you have numbness due to the nerve injury. Alternatively, it can also be set to a frequency that interferes with pain signals to the brain, reducing your pain even if the nerve damage isn’t reversible.
Will Your Insurance Cover Your Injury Treatment?
Many of our treatments are covered by Medicaid and health insurance. If you have questions about copays or what is covered, please contact our office staff, and they can get you an estimate.
If you’re still having concerns about paying for treatment, we recommend consulting a personal injury lawyer. In many cases, the at-fault party or their insurance carrier should be responsible for handling your out-of-pocket medical costs related to the injury. This is true not only in car accident cases but also in many other personal injury situations. For example, if you slip and fall in a grocery store, the store may be liable for failing to clean up a hazardous condition. In this case, your lawyer would file a claim with the store’s business liability insurance to recover your medical expenses.
Get Personal Injury Treatment in Suwanee Today at Optimum Health Rehab
If you’ve been injured, don’t wait – call (678) 546-0550 or contact our office online and set up an appointment for diagnosis and treatment today. Our office staff is ready to help you with insurance or scheduling questions.