Why Pain Sustained from an Auto Accident Is Often Delayed

Car accidents happen in the blink of an eye and it’s all you can do to process the entire event. As the adrenaline kicks in, pain often takes a backseat, which means you may not register any injury until much later.

We often joke about how something will hurt a lot more the next day — you slip and fall and you know that soreness and bruising will be there to greet you the next morning.

This same phenomenon is especially prevalent when it comes to car accidents. The accident itself happens in seconds, but it can take hours, and sometimes days, for the pain to set in.

If you consider that there are about 235 million licensed drivers in the United States who drive a whopping 3.2 billion miles each year, it should come as no surprise that car accidents are commonplace.

And should you find yourself in a car accident, here’s what the pain management team here at Apex Pain Specialists, including Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy, want you to know about delayed pain and injury.

Pain suppression after a car accident

The human body is designed with protective systems and a classic example of this is your fight-or-flight response. When you face a perceived threat, your sympathetic nervous system jumps into action to get you the resources you need to fight or flee a potentially dangerous situation.

When your body releases stress hormones like adrenaline, they suppress pain, which allows you to run away despite an injury, for example.

Well, this same adrenal rush likely occurs during a car accident. As a result, even though you might be walking around and feeling relatively OK, there can still be an injury and your pain response is just waiting to catch up after the stress response.

If you combine this pain suppression with confusion at the scene, it’s little wonder that a lot of people may not realize that they've been injured until later in the day or the next day.

Common car accident injuries

The nature of some car crash injuries also lends itself to a delayed reaction. For example, let’s look at one of the most common car crash injuries: cervical spine damage and whiplash. By the numbers, more than 1.2 million Americans develop whiplash on the heels of an automobile accident.

With whiplash, your head is rocked back and forth, which can compress your cervical discs and strain connective tissues in your neck. The primary whiplash symptom — neck pain — often doesn’t show up until the next day. Or whiplash symptoms like headaches might not develop for several days.

Other common car accident injuries include shoulder damage (from seatbelts and steering wheels), as well as lower limb injuries, such as damage to the knees.

No matter where you might have incurred bodily harm, know that your body might delay the symptoms so that you can deal with the immediate situation.

Whenever they do develop, we’re here to help. If you suspect you’ve been injured in a car accident or you want to get yourself checked out just in case, we can perform a full evaluation and check you from head to toe.

If we locate an issue, we can intervene quickly and set you on the road to recovery.

For expert car accident care, we invite you to call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 or book an appointment online today.