What is a Soft Tissue Injury?

If you are in an accident and you are injured, you may hear the other side, often through their insurance company, dismiss your injuries as “just soft tissue.” At first, you may think they’re right. But what exactly does that mean? And can it really prevent you from recovering compensation for your injuries after an accident?

Not a Real Medical Term?

Soft tissue is really just a term, often used by insurance companies, to try to minimize your injuries. You’ll often hear them say you have “just” soft tissue injury, but soft tissue actually plays a vital role in the functioning of your body, and while some soft tissue injuries may not be severe, many in fact are very severe.

What is Soft Tissue?

Almost every part of your body falls under the general description of tissue, or soft tissue, which is generally anything in your body that isn’t bone. As you can imagine, that broad category can cover some pretty important body parts.

Muscles, tendons and ligaments are considered soft tissue. But while, for example, a torn anterior cruciate ligament sounds very severe, saying that you just “damaged some soft tissue” makes that same injury sound minor.

Any tear of muscles in your body could technically be called a tear of soft tissue—even though muscle tears are severe, long lasting, painful and debilitating. That even includes the muscles of the heart, a part of the body that almost everybody would agree is pretty important.

Any injury to soft tissue can also carry damage to nerves, which can cause pain, loss of feeling, or loss of range of motion.

Some muscle tears may even require surgery. The same goes for any tears or ruptures of any tendons or ligaments in your body. These are the fundamental structures that hold your body together and make joint movement possible.

Whiplash and Your Spine

Some of those ligaments and tendons are in your cervical spine in the back of your neck, hence the use of the term “whiplash,” another derogatory term meant to minimize your pain and suffering that is often used by insurance companies. Whiplash is actually a tear or strain of the ligaments and tendons in the spine—hardly a small or minor injury.

Chronic or Acute?

Injuries to soft tissue can be chronic, which happens over time—imagine a repetitive injury that slowly wears down a ligament or tendon. More common in accidents however is acute trauma, where a force exerted in an accident causes a sudden tear to, or damage to, soft tissue.

Many soft tissue injuries may not be immediately painful, again, leading to the misconception and fallacy that soft tissue injuries are minor. Many people think that an accident can’t be very serious, if there isn’t immediate pain. But like many other injuries to the body, the worst part often comes a few hours or even a day after the injury, when swelling and inflammation sets in.

Most soft tissue injuries do heal. However, like your skin the body heals them with scar tissue—tissue that’s much less flexible than the original tissue, thus restricting range of movement.

If you have suffered a soft tissue injury or any other kind of injury, we can help.  Call the Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Joseph Linnehan, Jr. today at 617-275-4200.

Sources:

apexsofttissue.com.au/why-soft-tissue/

sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/soft-tissue