Toughing It Out Is the Most Expensive Thing You Can Do

Complete Care 3.0

By: Dr. Kesten

I know the type, because a good share of my patients are the type.

You’ve worked hurt before. You’ve gone in with a bad back, a bad knee, a hand you couldn’t close all the way. You don’t miss shifts. You don’t make a thing out of it.

So you got hit, and your plan is to walk it off.

Let me try to talk you out of that. Not with a lecture. Just with what I watch happen to people who wait.

What waiting actually does to you

When something in your neck or back gets stretched and torn, your body does the sensible thing. It guards. The muscles around the injury clamp down to hold it still.

That’s useful for about a day. After that, it turns on you.

Those locked-up muscles get tight and sore all on their own. Then you start moving differently to dodge the pain. Favoring one side. Keeping your head still instead of turning it. Swinging your whole body around to back out of a parking spot.

Then the good side starts hurting too, from doing double duty.

Keep that going long enough and you don’t have one problem anymore. You’ve got four, and they’re all feeding each other.

Sore is not the same as damaged

The other thing that happens is you stop moving, because moving hurts.

Here’s what I tell people. After this kind of injury, being sore when you move is normal. It is not a sign you’re doing more harm. Parking yourself on the couch until it passes is what stiffens you into a worse version of the problem.

The trick is knowing which movements help you and which ones to leave alone for now. That’s a two-minute conversation in the office, and it saves people months of guessing.

The part nobody wants to hear

The longer you wait, the longer it takes.

Not because we can’t help you later. We can, and we do, all the time. But a neck that’s been guarding and compensating for a couple of months takes a lot more work to undo than one we get our hands on in the first week.

You’re not saving time by toughing it out. You’re spending it. Just later, and more of it.

What to do

Come in. That’s the whole ask.

Bring whatever paperwork you’ve got from the scene or the hospital. Tell us what hurts, what you can’t do anymore, and what your job actually demands of you. That last one matters more than most people expect, because getting you back to work in one piece is the entire point of this.

Bottom line

Being tough is what got you this far, and nobody’s taking that away from you.

But toughing out a car wreck isn’t toughness. It’s just a longer, more expensive version of the same injury.

Come get looked at.