Slips and falls account for more than a million hospital emergency room visits. They cause significant injuries (short-term or long-term) that can impact your life negatively. A slip-and-fall accident may result in broken bones, neck injuries, spinal cord injuries, and concussions. You may also experience other types of traumatic brain injuries, lacerations and severe cuts, chronic pain, and facial injuries.
While quick recovery is essential for your well-being, recovery time varies from one victim to another depending on the actions they take after the injury, the type of injury suffered, and its severity. This article discusses seven tips for recovering after a slip and fall accident.
Seek prompt medical assistance
Slip and fall injuries can be severe. They can negatively affect the quality of life. If you slip, fall, and injure yourself, seeking immediate medical assistance is critical, even if your injury isn’t apparent or you aren’t feeling hurt. This is because some injuries take time to manifest, so waiting too long to get treated can worsen them. Your doctor must diagnose your injuries before recommending any treatment for proper recovery.
Nobody can tell how severe your injuries are or how they might progress over time without a diagnosis. Once you’ve been diagnosed, your doctor ensures you get the proper treatment for your injury, speeding up your healing. Slips and falls significantly contribute to Workplace Injuries. As such, seeking immediate medical treatment can help strengthen your workers’ compensation claim.
Follow the doctor’s advice
Most slip-and-fall accidents don’t heal immediately and require more care over time to ascertain full recovery. However, failure to follow your doctor’s advice may worsen your injuries or take longer to heal. Adhere to your doctor’s instructions because they’re qualified experts and know what your injury needs to recover. It also helps prevent complications that may need longer to treat and heal.
Sticking to the recommended treatment plan enables you to give the correct feedback to your healthcare provider based on what’s working and what isn’t. This allows your doctor to develop a treatment plan to help your quick recovery.
Doing as your medical doctor recommends also enhances long-term outcomes and improves function. Following up with your hospital visits and adhering to your doctor’s advice generates documentation, medical records, and notes capturing everything, including your treatment plan, recovery, and medical history. These documents are proof of the extent of your injury and its effects and can be used to support your personal injury claim.
Consider physiotherapy
Slips and falls often lead to painful injuries that need medical care and rehabilitation for complete recovery. Physiotherapy can help you recover from slip and fall-related injuries, including back injuries, hip fractures, and wrist sprains. After assessing your injuries, physiotherapists create a personalized treatment plan suitable for helping you recover your mobility and strength. During slip and fall accident physiotherapy, you’ll go through four phases regardless of the affected body part, including:
- Acute phase: This phase’s primary goal is relieving the injured body part’s pain and minimizing stiffness. A chiropractor physiotherapy expert uses adjustments to realign joints and reduce pressure and inflammation
- Rehabilitation stage: Once the pain subsides or you’re unable to utilize the injured body part, your physiotherapist will assist you in regaining its flexibility and complete mobility by doing light exercises
- Rebuilding strength stage: This phase involves returning to entirely using the injured body part. You’ll undergo the last chiropractic adjustments, then begin doing strength-building workouts
- Optimum medical improvement stage: Getting to this point means complete recovery, letting you get back to your daily routine
Rest
Resting or avoiding strenuous physical activity is crucial for your recovery following a slip and fall accident. Failure to rest or engaging in physical activities sooner may aggravate your injury, extending healing time. Not taking the recommended rest may lead to secondary injuries, which can sometimes be severe.
Get enough sleep
Sleep is vital for reduced persistent pain, improved immune system, more energy, and fast injury recovery. Tissues and muscles repair and renew during sleep. If you get insufficient sleep every night, your body might find it challenging to bounce back after an injury. When you fall asleep, your muscles relax, your heart rate goes down, your body temperature reduces, then you fall into a deep sleep. This results in improved blood circulation and the release of growth hormones. These hormones help repair and build muscles.
When you don’t sleep enough, the release of these hormones reduces, making it difficult for you to recover from injuries. Good sleep lowers stress hormone (cortisol) levels, letting growth hormones regenerate injured tissues more effectively. Additionally, getting enough sleep reduces stress and boosts mood, which is crucial during injury recovery.
Eat healthily
A healthy, balanced diet is crucial during injury recovery. The kind of food you consume during slip and fall injury recovery can affect your healing time frame and prepare your body for recovery. What you eat gives you the building blocks essential for all your biological processes. Specific ingredients can impact responses such as inflammation, lower muscular atrophy, and stimulate muscle regeneration. To help with your injury recovery, you should eat:
- Anti-inflammatory foods: These foods are vital components of your injury recovery diet. They include berries, fatty fish, mushrooms, avocado, and more
- Post-surgery foods: If your slip and fall injury necessitated surgery, post-surgery foods can help you recover faster. Take vegetables, fresh fruits, Greek yogurt, turmeric powder, and berries
- Lean protein-rich foods: Proteins have amino acids essential for maintaining energy levels and avoiding muscle atrophy. You can consume eggs, oats, almonds, lean beef, quinoa, tuna, and more to fuel your injury recovery
Stay hydrated
Staying hydrated is critical when recovering from an injury. There are three tissue repair stages following an injury, and every step requires water as a main catalyst to move from one phase to the next. They include:
- Inflammation: When your tissues are injured, they don’t receive the usual nutrient-rich blood and oxygen flow, causing cell death. Your body transmits fluids to the affected area to flush out the dead cells, allowing for new ones to grow, which isn’t possible without proper hydration
- Proliferation: For adequate oxygen and nutrient flow to be restored to the injured part, you should be well hydrated
- Remodeling: At this stage, proper hydration is crucial to ensuring excellent collagen levels essential for complete recovery
Endnote
Recovering after a slip and fall accident is challenging. However, implementing these tips can help your injuries heal faster.