Whiplash syndrome and forensic approach. A case report

Abstract

The same day as being involved in a traffic incident as a pedestrian hit by a car, a middle-aged woman accessed emergency medical care and was later discharged. After two days the patient returned to emergency with complaints of neck pain. X-rays were conducted was immobilized with a cervical collar. Since the pain persisted, she was examined a few days later by physiatry, where a limitation in the arc of motion of the neck was found and whiplash was considered a possibility. This type of cases related to chronic posttraumatic pain are relatively common in clinical consultation and represent a great challenge for physicians, mainly in the forensic field, since there are often many symptoms and very few signs to identify the damage. Therefore, a forensic doctor must recur to the clinical history and carefully examine the mechanism of injury and the evolution of the clinical presentation, in addition to calling on other disciplines such as orthopedics, physiatry, psychiatry and pain medicine to issue a definitive concept.

Keywords

• Whiplash
• Clinical forensics
• Traffic accident.