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News
for whiplash patients
Professor
Jostein Kråkenes has disputed his medical degree on the
subject whiplash at the University of Bergen, Norway. He now presents
a new discovery that makes life much easier for whiplash patients.
None has ever found a method for diagnosis of whiplash before. His
discovery means a lot to this group of patients.
By
the help of the MR-machine Kråkenes enlarges the pictures of
the neck to such an extent that the whiplash damage can be seen and
clearly found. He describes what these damages looks like. 92
patients with damages have been examined in the neck. Some of the
patients had older damages.
Kråkenes
have discovered that most whiplash patients have damage in the two
first cervical spines and not on lower level of the neck as thought
before. Whiplash implicates stretch-damages on the ligaments
structures. The function of these structures is to hold the head at
its right place. When these structures are normal they look black on
the screen.
In
up to at 85-90% of the cases the damage is to be seen on top of the
spines. With the technology of today we are by now not able to see
more damages further down on the neck. This means we don't yet have
the capacity to make a 100% sure investigation on the diagnoses,
Kråkenes says.
On
serious whiplash patients these structures are completely grey. It's
the stretch in the accident that makes them grey and that means that
their function has been disturbed. A small damage can be seen as
partly grey structures.
The
conclusion is that we now know how to diagnose whiplash. This means
we have the first step on the way to find a cure. The medical science
has a good tradition in finding a cure to these problems,
Kråkenes concludes.
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This new knowledge should alarm the car industry to construct better
headrests and better security equipment in the modern cars - that's
Kråkenes message to the car industry.
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