What you should know: Whiplash injury and its symptoms

Because of this being a touchy subject, I went to my radiology text book, Essentials of Skeletal Radiology. According to this text book, “The so-called whiplash syndrome is a common clinical condition that has received a high volume of published material since the 1960s, much of which – when scrutinized scientifically for validity – is found flawed. Neck spasms are common in all Western countries, and are reported in 20 to 60% of all motor vehicle accidents.

Classically, the injury follows a forced, hyperextension – hyperinflection of the cervical spine, most commonly associated with a rear-end motor vehicle collision. The lay press and legal profession have popularized the term whiplash as an all embracing term for a wide variety of soft tissue neck injuries from a broad spectrum of cases. Synonyms are numerous, including acceleration-deceleration, flexion-extension, hyperflexion-hyperextension, sprain-strain, myofascial injury, and soft tissue injury.