How healthy were you when the car accident happened?

A car accident happens every day! This idea has been around for a long time: your emotional and physical health before you have experienced trauma, like a car accident, has a lot to do with how much pain you are going to have afterward. And that idea is part of a more general belief in the power of prevention: that physical therapy or chiropractic treatment is not just for rehab, but for reducing the need for it before an accident even happens.

This emphasis on pre-trauma health and the value of prevention has long been a hallmark feature of physical therapies, such as massage and chiropractic care, a key selling point that justifies the cost of these services even when there is no obvious issue. That belief, once one of the symbols of how alternative we were, is now increasingly mainstream and increasingly based on hard scientific evidence.

Health status before accidents isn’t just “a factor” in how well you recover … it’s huge!
It’s easy enough to see how your physical health going into an accident would have something to do with how well you recover, but the “psychological distress” part is weirder, and strangest of all is that both of these factors are a greater risk factor for chronic pain than the severity of your accident.

All other things being equal, a severe accident is going to hurt worse than a lesser accident … but your mental and physical health going into it trumps the severity of the accident as a predictor of long-term neck pain.

So, a person who has a severe accident with awful whiplash may recover quickly and have no chronic neck pain … if they visit a car accident chiropractor. By contrast, someone who has a relatively minor accident may be worse off in a year … if they went into the accident with those psychological and physical risk factors.