Free Consultation
(314) 500-HURTLearn more about back and neck injury cases in St. Louis, Missouri and Illinois. Gary Burger and the lawyers of Burger Law have a long history of success in helping back and neck injury victims recover full damages.
Personal Injury Lawyers in Saint Louis, MO. Burger Law is committed to assisting injury victims, and their families in recovering from devastating accidents. Gary Burger and associates understand how detrimental back and neck injuries can be to your physical and financial health, and we are dedicated to getting you full compensation for your injuries.
For more information on back and neck injuries, and other personal injuries, click here.
I’m Gary Burger of the Burger Law Firm. I’d like to talk to you a little bit on this video about neck and back injuries. Regardless of the circumstances of how they occur, many people encounter neck and back pain and other associated symptoms from that. Those types of injuries can occur in a car accident, a motorcycle wreck, a truck crash. They can occur in an on-the-job injury. They can occur in a slip-and-fall. But, regardless of how those traumatic incidents occur, they can cause injury and produce back pain.
So our spine as you may know is a bunch of intervertebral discs on top of each other through which our spinal column travels and all the nerves that innervate our entire body. In between each of those vertebrae is an intervertebral disc. It’s kind of like a jelly donut that cushions between the discs and allows us the flexibility in our spine to move around.
I’d like to show you a couple of diagrams and some exhibits I have from a trial that I did to talk to you a little bit about the anatomy of a herniated disc or other spine type of injuries.
This is an exhibit in a trial that I did or parts of an exhibit. It’s one big board of a trial exhibit, which will be good to illustrate the body parts and anatomy of a neck. In an automobile crash, often, like in a rear-end crash, the neck is thrown forward. The body is thrown forward. The head is thrown back, and then the head is thrown forward. But actually in a slip-and-fall or other types of accidents there is trauma to the neck in different ways as well.
This is a side view of an MRI of someone’s neck, this same individual. So, the squares that you see there are the discs. The darker area between them are the… Excuse me. The squares you see there are the vertebrae. The lines between them are the intervertebral discs that you see. And then that thing going along there is the spinal column as you can see.
So, let me take you to another view of it right here. So, the squares as I just said are the vertebrae and the blue areas that you see there are the intervertebral discs. What happens in a disc herniation is that the jelly donut in between the two discs bursts and breaks and bulges out into the spinal canal. Your cervical discs are in your neck and those are denominated C. Your thoracic discs are in your midback and those are denominated as T, and your lumbar discs are denominated as an L, and then you go down to your sacrum as well.
This is an example of your cervical disc, and you see here that this blue substance there, when my client Darrell’s neck was herniated in this rear-end car accident, the disc that should be that height collapsed and was less. You see that? And so what happened was that this material bulged out and went into his spinal column which looks yellow in this picture.
Now we colored this in as part of our exhibit to try to teach this to the jury, and we put on exactly what the MRI had diagnosed in these different locations. There was a C4-5 disc bulge. This means the disc between vertebrae C4 and 5 was bulging. There was a C5-6 central disc herniation and a C6-7 right-sided disc herniation. Herniation means breach, and what that means is that those two areas between C5 and C6 and between C6 and C7 were herniated, and that disc material went out into the spinal cord. It impinged on the spinal cord. This often causes both pain in the area of the neck but also causes what’s called referred pain along nerve patterns or dermatomal patterns into the various parts of the body affected.
Typically, a herniation in the neck affects the arms and the hands. A herniation in the thoracic or mid-area of the back affects the chest. Herniations in the lumbar lower back area can affect your hips, groin and then down into your legs and your feet.
So, one of the ways doctors can tell whether or not you have a herniated disc is to see whether or not you have referred pain. Drastic herniated disc with instant pain can cause loss of urinary function, extreme pains in arm, loss of use of the arm as well. There are various ways to remedy these situations too in these conditions, which I’d like to talk about in another video. But basically, there’s a little bit of the anatomy of a herniated disc.
Thank you. This is Gary Burger again. My law firm’s Burger Law. If you have any questions about this type of medicine or injury resulting from some type of a trauma like this, please call us at (314) 500-HURT.
Founder | Injury Attorney
Gary Burger has dedicated his career to standing up against bullies. The founder and principal attorney of Burger Law | St. Louis Personal Injury Lawyer has helped hundreds of Missouri and Illinois individuals and families recover th …
Years of experience: 30 years
Location: St. Louis, MO
521 W. Main Street Suite 201 O
Belleville, IL 62220
By appointment only
(618) 500-4878 GET DIRECTIONS332 S Michigan Ave Suite 900
Chicago, IL 60604
By appointment only
(312) 500-HURT GET DIRECTIONS100 Chesterfield Business Pkwy Suites 200-222
Chesterfield, MO 63005
By appointment only
(314) 648-8348 GET DIRECTIONSNO FEES UNTIL WE WIN YOUR CASE
We offer free consultations and are available 24/7 to take your call. Live chat, text, and virtual meetings are available.
or call us at
(314) 500-HURT