When most people hear the word "whiplash" they think "car accident". And that is the most common way to get whiplash, but it is not the only way. Any time your head is jerked one way and then the other you can sustain a whiplash injury, for instance when getting tackled from behind in football.

What is Whiplash?
Whiplash is caused because your head weighs about as much as a bowling ball and is sitting atop a pile of blocks (the vertebrae of your spine) that are attached to your head and to each other with rubber bands and strings (the muscles, tendons and ligaments of the spine). Muscles stretch like rubber bands, ligaments and tendons do not.

Your head is very heavy compared to the soft tissue structure that holds it in place. Think of a tower of children's blocks. As long as the tower is built vertically, the blocks will remain in place by gravity and do not need to be glued. If you build the structure at an angle so that each block is slightly offset from the one below it, you will need glue or some other substance to hold the blocks in place or the tower will fall over.

Your neck is like the first tower. Since most of the time your head is sitting on top of your neck in a vertical manner, then "glue" was not needed. Since the addition of "glue" or some other structure that would make your neck more stable would, at the same time give you a smaller range of motion, the powers that be (whether you think they are God or evolution) decided that gravity was enough. Range of motion in the neck is very important.

Range of motion of the neck is what allows you to turn your head in so many different ways. Since our eyes are limited in the directions they can see due to being inside our heads it is very important that our heads turn. To preserve range of motion of the head, the vertebrae of the neck are held to each other and to the skull with ligaments (connecting bones to bones) and muscles (tendons are the structures that connect muscles to bones). This makes for a "stable enough system", it is stable enough under normal circumstances without compromising the range of motion too much.

What Happens to Cause Whiplash
Let's take the example of someone hit from behind and then coming into contact with something that stops their forward movement. For instance, while sitting at a red light a car is rear ended and pushed into the car in front of them, this is the most typical example of an accident that causes whiplash.

When they are hit from behind, the head snaps backwards, this is what the head rest in your car should prevent, and the body moves forward at the same speed at which the car is moving. To prevent injury, your body loosens all of the muscles in the neck allowing it to stretch as far as it can since the weight of the head is pulling the neck to it's limits. Ligaments do not really stretch much so they may get a little over-stretched at this stage, but the real damage comes later.

Then the car hits the car in front and comes to a halt. The sudden stop causes our person to be thrown against seat belt (if they are wearing one, if not the steering wheel) and then back into their seat and their head to be thrown forward. When their body changes direction their head snaps forward. The muscles that had been lengthening quickly get the message that the head is moving toward the midpoint so they shorten as quickly as possible. When the head passes the midpoint of the curve and continues forward the muscles are still shortening and do not have time to get the message to start lengthening again. By the time they get the message, the person's body is at rest in the car and it is too late - whiplash has already occurred. When the head shot forward on muscles that were in the process of shortening, the weight of the head ripped the muscles, tendons and ligaments to shreds.

Next month: Prevention and Treatment Techniques.

Leslie Hope has been licensed, certified massage therapist since 1988 when she graduated from the Massage Institute of New England. She is the owner of the Healing Hands of Hope in Boston, Mass.