The holidays are an exciting time of the year, with travelling to visit friends and family, parties and events, and general spiked enthusiasm and cheer. Unfortunately, the holidays are also when car accidents increase. Nothing ruins the holiday spirit like being a victim of a car accident. But why is this time of year so much worse than the rest of the year for car accidents?

Reasons Car Accidents Increase During The Holidays

In order to do your best to avoid car accidents, it’s important to understand the factors behind why they increase during the holiday. Here are some of the main reasons why you see car crashes spike this time of year.

Increased Traffic

More cars on the road means a higher likelihood for accidents. During the holidays, many people are taking work off to travel, and there’s a general increase in activities. More people are going shopping in order to get presents, running errands, eating out, going to events and parties, and visiting their friends and family. This buzz of activity results in an increase in traffic volume – and potential for crashes.

Bad Weather

If you live somewhere or visit somewhere where it snows, this is another contributing factor to increased automobile accidents. Snow storms lower visibility, and snow and ice can make the roads slick, causing cars to slip and slide.

Buzzed Or Drunk Driving

Holidays come with parties and many parties come with alcohol. Unfortunately, in spite of all the warnings about how you shouldn’t drive after drinking, many people still do. Alcohol impairs your judgement, vision, and ability to drive, which makes driving while buzzed or drunk extremely dangerous. Since there are more parties during the holidays, there are also more buzzed or drunk drivers, which makes the roads much more hazardous.

Holiday Stress

Traffic gets on the nerves of the best of us, and with increased traffic volume during the holidays, traffic only ever gets worse. This combined with how the holidays themselves can already be stressful due to everything you have to get done can lead to extremely stressed out drivers who ignore traffic rules or who drive distracted and ergo, recklessly. 

Neglected Car Maintenance

For many people, the holidays bring on financial stress, since you have gifts to purchase in addition to all your normal bills. This can lead to people neglecting their car maintenance in order to prioritise other things financially. However, keeping your car in good condition is essential to driving safely and avoiding accidents from an issue maintenance could have prevented.

Common Injuries From Car Accidents Chiropractors Can Help With

If you’ve been in a car accident, it’s vital to seek medical attention right away and call 911 if necessary. There are some injuries resulting from car crashes that chiropractors can help with. Many doctors will recommend chiropractic treatment in addition to medical care if you’ve experience any of the following injuries: 

Whiplash

Whiplash is when your spine and head snap back and forth rapidly, like if you go from driving to an abrupt stop in a crash. Chiropractors can help with whiplash in a number of ways, depending on how it has affected you. Your treatment options may include: spinal manipulation, muscle stimulation, specialized exercises and stretches, and suggestions for lifestyle changes to reduce muscle strain.

Pain In Your Back, Neck, And Shoulders

These are some of the most common kinds of pain resulting from a car accident. Chiropractors specialize in the spine and joints, so they can give you expert, personalized care in order to determine the specific cause of your pain and develop a treatment method tailored to you. 

Inflammation

Spinal manipulations and muscle relaxation techniques can stimulate your body’s natural healing process, including the release of IL-6, which is a natural substance in your body that works to reduce inflammation. 

Reduced Range Of Motion

Chances are, you’ll probably be feeling stiff after a car crash, and it’s harder to move. Stimulation therapy can improve your blood flow which can assist your muscles in their healing journey, restoring your range of motion.

Dizziness/Blurred Vision

If your spine gets misaligned after an accident, you may end up feeling dizzy or with blurry vision. While seeing an eye doctor should be your first step, chiropractors can help with blurred vision and dizziness if they result from obstructed pathways in your central nervous system, which is located in your spine and affects your optic nerves. Spinal manipulations can realign your spine and potentially resolve dizziness or blurred vision, if this is what was causing them.

Chiropractic Treatments After A Car Accident

Injuries from car accidents shouldn’t be ignored. Left untreated, many have the potential to worsen into more serious issues. If you’ve been in a car accident recently, you may consider going to a chiropractor to help treat your injuries. 

Have You Been In A Car Accident?

Health And Wellness Clinic specializes in auto injuries. We know how even though the holidays should be merry and bright, they also come with a lot more car crashes than is normal. We can help you with chiropractic treatments to get you feeling healthy again. For more information or to schedule an appointment, please contact our office today!

Are you experiencing spells of dizziness and nausea? You might be suffering from vertigo. Although this condition is not necessarily dangerous, it can seriously impact your quality of life. It’s hard to go about your day and do everything you need to when it feels like the world is spinning and like you may be sick. Fortunately, chiropractors can help relieve your vertigo in a variety of very effective ways. 

What Is Vertigo?

Vertigo is a sensation of feeling off kilter and like either you are spinning or like the world is spinning, even though you are not. 

What Causes Vertigo?

Many things can cause vertigo. In most cases, inner ear problems are the culprit. Vertigo can stem from migraines, Meniere’s disease, labyrinthitis (an issue usually related to infection), head or neck injury, brain problems, car accidents, and more. The most common cause of vertigo is a condition called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). 

BPPV happens when the miniscule calcium carbonate crystals from your inner ear organ end up in the canals of your inner ear. This can affect how your inner ear communicates with your brain, ergo, impacting your balance and creating a spinning sensation. 

Symptoms

Vertigo is most commonly associated with a spinning sensation. Its most common symptoms are feeling like you are spinning, tilting, swaying, unbalanced, and generally unsteady. These are not its sole symptoms, though. Other effects of vertigo include: nausea, vomiting, jerking eye movement, headaches, ringing in your ears, and sweating. You may experience any of this symptoms for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. 

Treatment Options

Vertigo usually goes away by itself within a few weeks. This is because typically, your brain will be able to adapt to how your inner ear changed and switch maintenance of balance to other areas. Sometimes, though, it can last for months or even years. Luckily, it’s a treatable condition, so you don’t need to worry about just waiting for it to fade on its own. 

What treatment looks like for you depends on the cause of your vertigo. They can range from physical therapy, to head and body movements designed to restore balance, like what a chiropractor can perform, to medication which will help with the nausea or inflammation, to surgery in the worst of cases, which are when the vertigo is an indicator of a serious problems such as a brain tumor. 

How A Chiropractor Can Help

If you suffer from vertigo, a chiropractor can help. Chiropractors have a number of treatments from spinal manipulations to head and neck movements such as that doctors will also do which can alleviate your vertigo. 

Chiropractors specialize in the spine and the central nervous system. This means that chiropractic adjustments can improve how the inner ear and the brain communicate, which can then improve your balance and reduce that spinning sensation. Chiropractic adjustments are also great for reducing inflammation, which can affect your inner ear, especially if you recently had an ear infection. 

The Epley maneuver is a proven method to treat vertigo, especially if it is BPPV. This treatment method affects the vestibular system, which is what maintains our balance. If our vestibular system is off, our balance is off. This maneuver is non-invasive, and involves moving and holding your head in certain positions for a set period of time. The reason why this works to treat vertigo is because it uses gravity to allow the crystals in your inner ear to move into another position, which can resolve the problem.

The effectiveness of the Epley maneuver depends on if there are multiple crystals in the ear or if the problem is in both ears. In this case, repetition over the course of a few days should fix the issue. This maneuver can be challenging sometimes, because vertigo can cause nausea, and this head movement can make you nauseous, which makes it hard to hold a set position for the designated time frame. 

This maneuver has proven to be effective for over 90% of people who suffered from vertigo, and is an extremely safe method of treatment. 

As you can see, there are a number of ways that a chiropractor can help your vertigo. You don’t need to just wait for it to go away on its own. Treatments can help get rid of it faster. 

Do You Need Help With Vertigo?

Here at Health And Wellness Clinic, we offer professional chiropractic care. If you’re suffering from vertigo, we can help you. We also offer a range of other treatments to get your body working properly again in a natural way. For any questions or to schedule an appointment, please contact us at Health And Wellness Clinic today! 

Whether or not children should see chiropractors is the subject of much debate. People generally believe that chiropractors are only for adults and are skeptical of the benefits of pediatric chiropractic care. There are many false claims made about pediatric chiropractic care that contribute to this skepticism. Here’s what you need to know both about the benefits pediatric chiropractic care can offer and about what it cannot do.

Why Does Pediatric Chiropractic Care Exist?

Chiropractic care is not restricted to adults and has long included those under the age of eighteen. This is because adults are not the only people who suffer from misalignment and other musculoskeletal issues; children under 18 do, as well. These issues do not start at 18; as long as you have a musculoskeletal system, it can go out of alignment or have issues, which is why pediatric care exists. 

A major argument in favor of pediatric chiropractic care is the fact that since children are still growing and developing, that makes seeing a chiropractor to ensure everything is in alignment is especially important, to ensure that children’s development isn’t impeded by preventable issues. Here’s what you should know about what pediatric chiropractic care can do for children. 

What Pediatric Chiropractic Care Can Do

While true that there are claims that some chiropractors make for chiropractic care doing things that have no scientific evidence, this does not invalidate the very real benefits chiropractic care can indeed provide for children. What chiropractors can help with with children is musculoskeletal conditions, as you may expect, with their area of expertise being the musculoskeletal system. 

As mentioned above, children are in a constant state of development. In order to be able to grow correctly, their bodies require proper alignment. Chiropractors can help with this. Chiropractors are experts at finding misalignments in the spine and righting them, ergo assisting with proper development. 

If you’ve ever had back pain or neck pain or the like, you’ll know how that affects everything you do. If your back hurts, that likely means that sitting hurts, standing hurts, walking hurts, lying down hurts, etc. This hurts and annoys adults; and even more so affects children. Chiropractic care can relieve stress and anxiety and sleep issues through alleviating this pain by getting to the root of the pain itself. 

Since your central nervous system is in your spine, this means that pressure on your spine can cause pressure on how your nerves communicate with each other. Relieving that pressure and fixing alignment issues can help not just adult’s but also children’s nerves communicate with each other better, in addition to helping it grow properly. Since pain can be a major cause of bad moods and behavioral issues in children, treating the source of the pain can help with those things, if it is caused by musculoskeletal issues. 

What Pediatric Chiropractic Care Does Not Do

There are many reasons why people are wary of pediatric chiropractic care, and many of them stem from false claims some chiropractors make. While many chiropractors may promote themselves as a primary care provider and claim that they can help with such issues as colic and more, science does not support this. This belief is often spread by biased magazines with no clinical studies to support and prove their claims. 

It’s important to be wary of chiropractors who make such claims and to consult with a physician about health issues such as colic and the like. There is a substantial lack of evidence for the theory that subluxated vertebrae cause illnesses in children, and you don’t want to expose your child to unnecessary radiation of an x-ray trying to prove this. 

However, there are people who make false claims in every industry, no matter what it is. These do not invalidate the very real benefits that pediatric chiropractic care can offer. If you have any questions or concerns about pediatric chiropractic care, it’s important to consult with your doctor and a legitimate chiropractor in order to make an informed decision. 

The Takeaways About Pediatric Chiropractic Care

The fact is that chiropractic care offers similar benefits to children as it does adults, as well as some additional ones in helping with development. So long as a chiropractor is trained in how to work with a developing child, pediatric chiropractic care could be a good choice for you, especially if your child is at risk for misalignment, through playing sports or some other activity. 

Pediatric chiropractic care can help with musculoskeletal issues, and since those can snowball into issues that affect your overall health, to an extent, it can also help improve your overall well-being through treating a problem that could be impacting it. 

Pediatric chiropractic care can help with children’s overall mood, health, and happiness through treating pain and alignment issues that could be impacting them. It can also help with proper development through their childhood. 

Are You Considering Pediatric Chiropractic Care?

Here at Health And Wellness Clinic, we offer professional, informed pediatric chiropractic care. We are happy to help your children grow up strong and healthy. To schedule an appointment or for any questions, please feel free to contact us today!