When we talk about car accidents, one thing is for sure: no matter how much you try to avoid crashing or how careful you are, someone from somewhere with some kind of vehicle will run into your car due to slight negligence. Car accidents are unpredictable. Although there are ways where you can be extremely cautious and avoid car crashes, there’s still no guarantee that everyone will be as careful as you on the road.

How often these auto accidents occur depends on the area we are talking about. According to the National Highway Traffic Administration US, a car accident occurs every 60 seconds, which means we have a handsome amount of 5.25 million car accidents in the country in a year. And if we talk especially about Georgia, it is one of the busiest and most popular states of the US, and car accidents are a prevalent problem there.

According to Crash Analysis, Statistics and Information Notebook 2008, more than 70 drivers get in a car accident every hour. It means about 1,720 people get involved in accidents every day.

In 2008, the total number of car crashes in Georgia was reported to be 342,534, with 133,555 people injured and 1,703 dead. It clearly means that if you are living in Georgia and have seen or been involved in an accident, you are not alone. According to probability status, in 10 years, every resident of Georgia is likely to be involved in a traffic collision. That might be a stretch, but it certainly gives you something to think about, raise awareness about, and a chance to know what can happen if you ever did get involved in a car crash.

Marietta is a small town city in the US state of Georgia, located northwest of Atlanta with a 23.48 mi² area. The small city had a population of 60, 867 as of 2019, making it one of the largest suburban areas in Atlanta. The number of annual car accidents in Marietta is smaller than most other cities in Georgia because of its low population and high-maintained urban life.

However, if you are based in Marietta and want to educate yourself about car accident injuries and how to treat them, keep on reading.

Visible Injuries: Cuts, Bruises, Abrasions, and Broken Bones

One of the most common types of injury caused by a car accident is visible on your skin, including cuts, scrapes, and abrasions, and in some cases, broken bones. You can feel and spot these injuries right after the accident. While cuts and scrapes would be healed sooner with bandages and ointments, broken bones can take a while for you to recover from, and it’d require you to equip plasters and movability devices to move properly and safely.

In addition to that, another visible injury is a burn. That is when the collision is intense and results in the leakage of fire or some kind of chemical that interacts with your skin and burns it. The severity of the burn determines what kind of treatment will be necessary and how soon the skin will heal. Mild or moderate burns can be healed with the help of medications and ointments, but severe burns where the source of burn has reached the flesh might even require skin surgery.

Neck Injuries: Whiplash

Neck injuries are pretty common in car accidents, and the most occurred neck injury in car hits is whiplash. It is usually caused by rear-end car accidents, where the force hits your vehicle from the back and jerks your body forward, causing your neck to instantly move back and forth – that happens when your spine catches your neck going forward and snaps it back into place.

This jolt is so sudden and so instant that it affects the cervical joints in your neck that connect with the vertebrae. Moreover, in this kind of injury, tendons and neck muscles are also affected, making it worse and painful.

Symptoms of whiplash include neck pain, stiffness in the neck, intense headache, dizziness, lack of motion, lack of vision, and fatigue. In rare cases of whiplash, some people experience ringing in the ears and memory loss. Patients experiencing whiplash where the discs between cervical joints and vertebrae are damaged, pain and stiffness would take over the neck.

However, the worse thing about whiplash is that it sometimes doesn’t show its symptoms at first. Assume you have contracted whiplash during the accident but you don’t feel anything in your neck. That happens because of the trauma and shock the person is going through. After some hours or a day or two, when the person involves in some neck movement, they experience pain and lack of movement, which means whiplash.

It is recommended that you immediately see a special auto injury doctor right after the accident, so your whiplash can be diagnosed before it starts showing symptoms and makes the case worse for you. Although whiplash is also contracted in trips and falls, and in sports like horse riding, basketball, or soccer, the whiplash car accident causes is undoubtedly the worse.

Doctors conduct X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans to diagnose whiplash and start treating it before it gets worse. Because if left untreated, whiplash can get intensely worse.

Back Pain

While whiplash is a neck injury itself, it doesn’t leave some people without affecting their lower back too. A spine is a chain made of vertebrae connected with each other. If the injury occurs in a cervical spine and triggers whiplash, it’s possible that the whole spine gets affected and triggers pain and swelling in the lower back.

Even if your back wasn’t directly blown in the accident, the shock in your body and sudden movements and jerks can cause discomfort, which may result in back pain.

While there’s no specific cause of back pain, the factor of age, body type, and body movement plays a role in how your certain body part – back, in this case – will be affected in a collision.

If you are facing back pain after being involved in the accident, don’t shove it under the carpet. If your back pain is not properly and professionally treated, it might become chronic. And even if you manage to get rid of it once, there’s no guarantee that it won’t surface back after the lowest strain in your back.

If you are based in Marietta, Georgia, the best way to treat your back pain is to make an appointment with a professional Marietta chiropractor and have them treat you the way you are supposed to be treated.

Head Injuries

Head injuries are most common in those who don’t wear a seatbelt and aren’t properly restrained while the accident occurs. A hard blow on the head can result in blunt force trauma and cause severe injuries. In most head injuries, the head gets impacted by the windshield if the person isn’t wearing a seat belt.

The most common kind of head injury is a concussion, where the person experiences unconsciousness immediately after the impact and wakes up to suffer headache, dizziness, memory loss, lack of vision, and more. That said, being unconscious isn’t a hard requirement to contract a concussion. It is also one of the symptoms of whiplash.

A concussion can be treated with rest, avoiding screens and focus-needed activities, and medications.