North Portland Chiropractor Talks About Stages & Conditions Of Injuries

When I talk to my patients about their injuries the questions I get most often are about “chronic” conditions of injuries. With today’s blog I wanted to talk about these conditions and hopefully give you a better idea of what the stages of injuries are defined as, so you know how to take action. Contact our team at North Portland Wellness Group on how to overcome your injuries in North Portland.

Stages of Injuries in North Portland OR:

The acute condition and stage:

An acute injury is from a single traumatic event, like rolling your ankle, a concussion, a fracture, etc... something that immediately happened.

There is also an acute stage of an injury’s healing process, this is when your body is trying to figure out what happened and starts working to mend the injury. Your body’s immune system is very active during this phase, so the area of injury will be swollen, red and painful. The acute phase lasts from the initial minute of the injury to about 4-5 days. The pain, redness and swelling is definitely a terrible part of the injury, but it’s important to keep in mind your body is working hard to help you heal.

Quickly, with something mentioned above, something like a sprained ankle has a caveat to the acute phase, you can have “chronic acute injuries”, which I’ll talk about a little later in this blog.

The subacute condition and stage:

When you’re in the subacute/post-acute phase of an injury, it’s been about 4-5 days since the initial injury. During this stage, your body is repairing the damage and new tissue is growing. Your range of motion is improving and the swelling is going down, however, it is easy to re-injure yourself during this stage of healing because of the new tissue that’s growing and at the same time your movement is coming back. As this stage lasts for about 3 weeks, it’s important to keep in mind that yes, you're starting to feel better, but you’re not healed.

The chronic condition and stage:

Although the name “chronic” can be confusing, it's just the name of a stage in the injury process. It is named the chronic stage because there isn’t a specific end date, to its time limit to this phase. As the acute stages and the subacute stages have hours, days and weeks attached to them, the chronic stage can last a long time to heal, up to years in some cases.

As mentioned earlier, I’ll talk a bit about “chronic acute” injuries. These are often called “recurring” injuries. An example of a recurring injury would be something like a sprained ankle, it gets easier and easier to re-injure that ankle because unfortunately, the body will never be able to restore it back to its 100% health and in the case of a sprained ankle, its because the ligaments involved have more laxity post injury.

Injuries happen, but it’s important to seek out the right care to get you on the right path back to health and also have an understanding of the repairing process along the way.

References

Knight, Kenneth L. “More Precise Classification of Orthopaedic Injury Types and Treatment Will Improve Patient Care.” Journal of Athletic Training, The National Athletic Trainers' Association, Inc., 2008, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267322/#:~:text=The%20care%20of%20acute%20(and,postacute%20(after%2014%20days).