Facet Joint or Whiplash Injury is Most Likely in Rear End Collisions

If you have been involved in a car accident, whiplash injuries need to be taken very seriously. Because symptoms of a whiplash injury can take weeks or months to manifest, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that you are not as injured as you really are.  Too often people don’t seek treatment following a car accident because they don’t feel hurt. By far, the most common injury to the neck is a whiplash injury. Whiplash is caused by a sudden movement of the head, either backward, forward, or sideways, that results in the damage to the supporting muscles, ligaments and other connective tissues in the neck and upper back.  If you feel like you have been injured in an accident and can’t get the settlement you need, please Contact Us for a FREE Consultation.

Hi, I’m Tim Williams with Dwyer Williams Potter Attorneys.  I’m the lead litigation attorney here at the firm and also a partner.  I’d like to talk a little bit about facet joint injuries.

The back is comprised of several layers of bone.  Between the bones are disks.  Towards the rear of the spine—now this is the back, and towards me is the belly—we see these bony prominences, and attached to these are muscles.  And then we also see joints here.  These are actually sliding joints and they’re called facet joints.  The purpose of a facet joint is to keep the back from moving too far, because without these joints the back could hyper-extend and actually break. We don’t want that.

The problem with the facet joints, though, is they can become injured because there is a thin layer of cartilage in between each one allowing them to slide.  Sometimes an accident or injury can occur where one of the sides of the joint is actually fractured, where the cartilage on the inside is torn, where there is an inflammatory response causing pain, which causes more inflammation and causing more pain.  So it’s a cyclical response.  Or, alternatively, where there is actually a separation or a complete dislocation of the facet joint itself.

A Facet Joint Injury Can be Painful

Facet joint injuries can be extremely painful.  They typically resolve with minimal treatment; usually, anti-inflammatory medications and pain medication.  Sometimes, however, there is injections that are required into the joint spaces themselves to alleviate the pain and the inflammation, and in the rare instance, there is actually surgery that is performed to either take out that layer of the smooth cartilages on the inside or sometimes, in the very rare instance, they will actually take out the joint itself.

I want to thank you for watching this video.  And please feel free to

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