Attempted murder

[wheatstone]

A patient of mine was assaulted by a psychogeriatric patient at her work place. He essentially tried to break her neck by twisting.
Needless to say she has some post traumatic stress and fear around treatment but has found some confidence with the process.
Since the workplace has minimised the incident there has been pathetically little follow up for this unfortunate lady. WCB is most uncooperative.
Does anyone have experience of traumatized alar and transverse ligaments that are not frankly ruptured. She has paresthesia in left upper extremity often and left trigeminal distribution at times. Also tinnitus, pain behind eye, and neck pain. Ligament testing is very painful but I can't pick up increased joint excursion.
Any suggestions?

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• 2 Chronic Pains, all attempted solutions have failed.

[alophysio]

I am sorry about your patient's plight.

For her anxiety etc, i have found NLP (neurolinguistic programming) very helpful - i would make sure that the NLP practitioner is not a "success coach" as a lot are but actually a caring practitioner.

As for the C/S, upper cervical stabilisation exercises can be tried. Think of it like lumbar multifidus training but for the neck. Gentle contraction for the deep segmental stabilisers, downtraining of the global, strappy muscles (SCM, scalenes, etc). Then add levers gradually etc.

Otherwise, treat her neck like a whiplash victim.

[Physio-Oms]

Very intriguing title!
sorry about your patient, very upsetting.
I was gonna recommend that you should treat him/her like a whiplash injury, but the person above me beat me to it
Good luck!