I Want To Talk About Ligaments

I know, you don’t think about ligaments, right?

You hear about them mainly in the knee, especially with people who have sports injuries.

You hear about their ACL or MCL being torn or ruptured or sprained.

Ligaments are throughout your whole body.

And where we start to get issues is in the neck or the low back, especially after a car accident or slips and falls because of that whiplash-type motion.

Now, when we look at ligaments, we’re going to have ligaments that run down the front and in the back.

Their job is that they keep all these bones moving together.

You’re not having bones move independently of one another.

The problem is, is with that whiplash overstretches ligaments rapidly.

It sometimes even partially tears them.

When they get that partial tearing, they no longer can protect and keep things moving the right way, so we have bones that start moving independently.

The real issue is as you start moving, these ligaments are unstable, so bones start moving independently, and that can begin to affect the spinal column.

That’s going to cause pain and symptoms.

It’s going to cause the muscles that attach in here to clamp down, and we’re going to have muscle spasm and guarding.

Now the problem with this is that there’s only one way to diagnose these, that’s through motion films.

We have them in our office.

It is the gold standard to look for these, and it’s important to find injuries early.