What Does it Mean to Injure “Soft Tissue?”
When it comes to injuries that people sustain in accidents, the insurance industry has done a good job of creating or manipulating certain words and phrases to influence the public's general feelings about them. Nowhere else is this truer than in the phrase "soft tissue."
Soft tissue, or saying that someone has sustained a soft tissue injury, has, in the public eye, become the same as saying "no injury;" you'll often hear defendants or insurance companies say that a Defendant has sustained "only" soft tissue injuries. This minimizes what is and can be a serious, painful, and long-term injury.
What is Soft Tissue?
Soft tissue is actually a very vague term, even in the medical community. It has come to mean basically every part of your body that isn't bone, from organs to tendons to ligaments. Injuries to any one of these can be significant, serious, and debilitating.
Imagine someone with a rotator cuff tear—a tear of the ligaments that hold the shoulder bone in place and allow us to use our shoulders and arms. This is a painful and debilitating injury, which often requires surgery, and yet, it technically is a "soft tissue" injury. The same goes for ACL or MCL tears, which are so serious they can keep professional athletes out of their sports for up to a year.
Soft tissue, like most parts of your body, also has nerves embedded in them and around them, which can lead not only to pain but also loss of feeling and numbness.
Injuries to the Neck
Soft tissue is often used in terms of the muscles and bones in your neck, particularly in accidents that involve rear-end collisions. The bony vertebrae in your neck that protect your spine are bones like any other and have to be held to each other and held to the musculature of your neck by ligaments and tendons.
In a serious rear-end accident, those ligaments can stretch and tear, causing serious and long-term pain. And yet, in these kinds of injuries, you will often hear "soft tissue" and "whiplash" being used almost derogatorily or in a way that minimizes the severity of the injury.
Pain After an Accident
Soft tissue injuries sometimes don't hurt or don't hurt as much immediately after an accident. It may take hours, or even a day, for the pain to manifest, which is usually a result of internal inflammation. Normal diagnostics at the standard emergency room don't use equipment that can detect soft tissue injury; soft tissue injuries don't show up on the standard X-ray machine.
That delay in pain, although normal, can also lead a jury to doubt the severity of a soft tissue injury. That's why it is important to get medical treatment after an accident, even if you don't feel like you are in enough pain to warrant it—because the pain after an accident may not reflect the pain you may eventually find yourself in after some time has passed.
Contact A Louisiana Personal Injury Attorney Today
For more information, contact the Law Offices of Philip B. Adams. If you have been injured in a Louisiana accident, our Louisiana personal injury lawyers can help you recover the full compensation you are entitled to according to Louisiana law. To contact us, complete our "Contact Us" page here. You may significantly benefit by having an attorney with legal competence and experience assist you with your Louisiana personal injury case. We have offices in Shreveport and handle personal injury cases throughout Louisiana. Thank you for reading this blog article and visiting our website.