Suffering from elbow and arm pain after a car crash?
Getting into a car accident is traumatic enough, and dealing with injuries can make the aftermath especially challenging. If you experience injuries that cause elbow and arm pain after a car accident, it can be difficult to go about your daily life.
It’s important to understand what causes elbow and arm pain after a car accident, the injuries often associated with that pain, and how a personal injury attorney can help you get the compensation you deserve for your trauma.
What causes elbow or arm pain after a car accident?
During an accident, your first reaction is often either to shield your face and head from damage or to tightly hold the steering wheel. These instinctive actions often lead to trauma and injuries in the soft tissues, bones and joints in your arms. Car accidents can also cause violent collisions between your arms and objects in your car, like the steering wheel, windows, or airbags. This impact can create arm injuries that cause arm pain after a car accident.
Whether or not you experience elbow pain after a car accident depends heavily on the way your arms were positioned during the accident. If your elbows were locked or if they hit something in your car when the accident happened, you will likely experience some elbow pain.
Common Arm and Elbow Injuries Caused by Car Accidents
Our arms are made up of four parts (upper arms, forearms, wrists, and hands) that we use to carry out countless motions every day. When the bones, tissues, joints and ligaments in our arms undergo trauma during car accidents, it can result in injuries like:
- Rotator Cuff Tear: A tear in the tendons that surround the shoulder joint.
- Fracture (Clavicle, Scapula, Humerus, or Forearm): A partial or complete bone break.
- Dislocated Shoulder: A shift between the shoulder bone (humerus) and socket (glenoid cavity).
- Tendon Damage: Tendon tears or inflammation.
- Torn Ligaments: Incomplete or total tears in an arm ligament.
- Muscle Sprain: Stretching or tearing of muscle tissue.
- Whiplash: A neck injury that can create significant radiating arm pain.
- Brachial Plexus: Pain, weakness, or numbness in the arm and/or hand caused by injury to the nerves that travel between the spinal cord and the shoulder, arm, and hand.
Elbow Injuries
Elbow injuries are especially difficult car accident injuries because they affect your ability to bend and flex your entire arm. Your mobility can be severely impaired and your life totally disrupted. Elbow injuries may include:
- Elbow break: A break of at least one of the (three) bones that create the elbow joint.
- Radial Head Fracture: A break in the radius (the smaller forearm bone) near the elbow.
- Elbow Ligament Sprain: Overstretching or tearing of the ligaments surrounding the elbow.
- Elbow Dislocation: Movement of the radius and ulna (forearm bones) from the humerus (upper arm bone), causing the elbow joint to be dislocated.
- Elbow Avulsion Fracture: When a small bone piece (attached to a ligament or tendon) pulls away from the main part of the bone.
Believe it or not, there are 6.75 million car accidents in the U.S. every year. That’s roughly 18,510 per day! Have you been injured in a car accident that was not your fault? Are you experiencing elbow or arm pain? Alabama personal injury attorney Mark Petro can help you get the compensation you deserve. With years of experience fighting for clients just like you, Mark Petro is here to guide you through the entire personal injury claim process.
Contact Mark Petro of Petro Accident & Injury Attorneys for a Free Consultation
Born and raised in Alabama, Mark Petro has represented thousands of individuals injured as a result of car accidents. He has built a reputation for being the go-to guy to get personal injury claims handled in a manner that maximizes the amount of recovery so that you get what you deserve sooner rather than later. Be smart, call Mark for a free consultation! Let us fight for you!
Request a FREE copy of Mark’s book, The Truth About Injury Claims here.
