Avoiding Whiplash: Have you adjusted your car’s head restraints lately?

But there’s one area where we’re largely clueless, claims car safety advocate, Dr. Arthur Croft: head restraints. Most of us (80 percent of drivers) never adjust them; most of us never even consider them. We call them “head rests” and think of them as just that — not a vital safety feature. But improper use of head restraints results in about 3 million whiplash injuries per year — and half of these people, says Dr. Croft, will have long-term problems: from “minor aches and pains that won’t go away, to headaches and back pain. And 10 percent will become disabled.”

The sobering facts are that proper adjustment of the head restraint is simple, and the safety repercussions are huge. “We keep looking for new data or a new phenomenon, but it’s just as basic as that,” stresses Dr. Croft, who became concerned about whiplash years ago when a family friend and her daughter were involved in a car crash, walked away feeling fine, and had problems for years afterwards.

A chiropractor by training, Dr. Croft is also a trauma epidemiologist and is Board-certified in chiropractic orthopedics; he has focused on whiplash injury for the past 23 years. He has written several books on the subject, produced DVDs, developed the widely used whiplash (WAD) grading system, and is founding director of the Spine Research Institute of San Diego.

Since 1969, head restraints have been mandated in cars sold in the U.S. There has been no requirement, however, to make them effective. The latest news is that every car manufactured after 2007 will have better head restraints, conforming to the current European standards (where national health policies dictate strong measures against whiplash and its resulting financial repercussions). Dr. Croft is hopeful this will go a long way toward reduction in whiplash injuries in this country, but until then — and going forward — here are the facts:

• The top of the back of the head should be in line with the top of the head restraint, and the gap between should be no more than about two inches. Alternately, the middle of the back of the head should be in line with the middle of the head restraint.

• Head restraints are easy to adjust — they go only up and down. If you’re tall and can’t adjust to the above, the head restraint should be pushed up as high as it will go.

• Crash testers tend to use dummies in a car that crashes into a wall. But many crashes are impacts from behind. The head will be forced backward and ideally, into the head restraint, easing the impact. Without a head restraint at its proper height, the head will remain motionless initially, while the seat back accelerates the torso forward. The shear force directed through the spine as a result can damage spinal ligaments, discs, nerves, and joints. If the head restraint is too low, the head will rotate backwards over the restraint, allowing potentially injurious bending of the neck and damage to ligaments, discs and joints and nerves in the neck.