Hoi allemaal,
Ze zeggen dat whiplash toch een moderne hype is lees dit dan eens.
Groetjes
F. vd Graft
De tekst was afkomstig van deze site.
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The History of Whiplash
About Whiplash
Whiplash is a modern problem. While head and neck injuries certainly occurred
before the invention of modern transportation, they were mostly limited to falls
and the injuries of war. It was not until the invention of the train--not the
automobile--that these types of injuries became common to the general
population.
Train travel in the 19th century was a hazardous and potentially lethal
activity. Train schedules were virtually random, telegraphs had yet to be
invented and so there was no way to communicate problems on the line, and in
many parts of the eastern U.S there did not even exist a standard time between
different cities by which to coordinate schedules. The result was hundreds of
railroad crashes. Exacerbating the problem was the fact that railway cars were
flimsy, wooden structures with no protection for the occupants. Railway
collisions were a common occurrence.
Soon, a group of people started coming forward who claimed that they had been
injured in train crashes, but had no obvious evidence of injury. The railroads,
at the time run by men seeking quick profit, rejected these claims as faked.
Some physicians, however, took the injuries seriously. In 1882, the British
surgeon Dr. John Eric Erichsen authored the book Concussion of the Spine.388 In
it, he wrote,
"It must, however, be evident to you all, that in no ordinary accidents can the
shock, physical and mental, be so great as in those that occur on railways. The
rapidity of the movement, the momentum of the persons injured and of the vehicle
that carries them, the suddenness of its arrest, the helplessness of the
sufferers, and the natural perturbation of mind that must disturb the bravest,
are all circumstances which necessarily greatly increase the severity of the
resulting injury to the nervous system, and which have led surgeons to consider
these cases as somewhat exceptional and different from ordinary accidents."
Even though he did not have access to the latest high tech imaging tools...
richsen did not have access to MRI or CT scans. He couldn't study the effects
of these injuries with electron microscopes or high-speed video cameras. Even
with these limitations, he proved himself a brilliant observer and physician.
He was the first to recognize why these types of accidents cause injuries:
"I have often remarked that in railway accidents those passengers suffer most
seriously from concussion of the nervous system who sit with their backs turned
toward the end of the train which is struck. Thus when a train runs into an
obstruction on the line, those who are sitting with their backs to the engine
will probably suffer most; whilst if a train is run into from behind, those who
are facing the engine will most frequently be the greatest sufferers. The
explanation of this fact appears to me to be as follows. When a train runs into
a stationary impediment, its momentum is suddenly arrested, whilst that of the
passengers still continues. Those who are facing the engine are in the first
instance thrown suddenly and violently forwards off their seats against the
opposite side of the compartment; hence they will frequently be found to be cut
about the head and face, and more especially across the knees and legs, by
coming in contact with the edge of the opposite seats&…;Those, on the
other
hand, who are sitting with their backs to the engine, being carried backwards
when the momentum of the carriage is suddenly arrested are struck at once; and
if travelling rapidly, are jerked violently against the backs of their seats,
and thus suffer in the first instance and by the first shock from concussion of
the spine&…;The oscillations to which the body is subjected in these
accidents
are chiefly felt in those parts of the vertebral column that admit of most
movement, viz., at the junction of the head and neck, of the neck and shoulders,
and of the trunk and pelvis."
Seventy years before the first engineering tests had been performed on whiplash,
Erichsen had correctly identified why whiplash injuries are more hazardous than
other types of collisions, and had described the exact whiplash motion.
Erichsen admitted that he did not understand the biological mechanism behind
such injuries, but, from his observations, termed these injuries "concussion of
the spine." Other surgeons, hired by the railroads to fight injury claims,
ridiculed the notion of railway injuries in general and spinal concussion in
particular. Ironically, and 115 years later, some of the most recent literature
on whiplash has found evidence that the spinal cord and the spinal nerves may
indeed be traumatized, or "concussed," during whiplash movements.
The last few years have brought some of the most exciting developments in the
understanding of whiplash. Careful research has started to show how the spine
can be injured, even in low speed collisions. These new findings will help us
not only understand how to help patients recover, but eventually help us avoid
these injuries in the first place.
Understanding the complexity of the whiplash syndrome is the key to solving the
problem.
(© Copyright 1999 Body-Mind Publications. All rights reserved.