Pain & Injury Care in Sunset Hills, MO

Concussion, whiplash, cervicogenic headache and chronic headache are what Gateway Midwest Healthcare treats most for Sunset Hills patients, including concussion with no head strike. No referral is needed, and no attorney is needed to be treated after an accident.

Sunset Hills sits beside the I-44 and I-270 interchange, a persistent source of highway collision injury.

Can you get a concussion in a car crash without hitting your head?

Two interstates meeting produces sustained merging at speed, and the crashes are correspondingly severe. We see more concussion from this corridor than from the arterial ones, and more of it goes unrecognized because there was no head strike.

A concussion without a head strike is entirely ordinary — the brain decelerates inside the skull whether or not anything hits it. What follows is headache, poor concentration, light sensitivity and disturbed sleep, usually attributed to stress rather than to the crash.

The roads around Sunset Hills, and what they send us

I-44 and Lindbergh bound Sunset Hills, with Gravois running to the southeast.

The mix of highway and arterial road here produces both ends of the range. The arterial stretches supply the low-speed collisions and the highway stretches supply the longer daily exposure.

Most of that traffic runs through the I-44 and I-270 interchange, with Lindbergh and Watson Road feeding it. High-energy merge and rear-end collisions dominate.

What we treat most for Sunset Hills patients

What does a concussion feel like after a crash?

Concussion without a head strike is entirely ordinary physics. The brain has mass and is suspended in fluid; rapid deceleration moves it relative to the skull whether or not anything external makes contact. In a collision this happens routinely.

The symptom set is unhelpfully vague, which is why it gets attributed to stress: headache, difficulty concentrating, feeling a step slow, light and noise sensitivity, disturbed sleep, and irritability out of character. Almost none of it is specific, and all of it is common in the two weeks after a crash.

Complete rest prolongs recovery, which surprises people. Graded return to activity — starting below the symptom threshold and increasing as tolerated — produces better outcomes. The other essential step is establishing whether the headache is coming from the brain or from the injured neck, because the second is treated entirely differently.

Planning the trip from Sunset Hills

For Sunset Hills patients the work most often centers on concussion and head injury, cervicogenic headache, whiplash and chronic headache. Each of those has its own page setting out how it is diagnosed here and what treatment actually involves, and reading the relevant one before the appointment tends to make the visit more productive.

Allowing about thirty minutes by I-270 each way, we try to make every visit earn the journey. That usually means combining assessment and procedure where it is clinically sound to do so.

Come with prior imaging if you have it, an accurate medication list, and dates of any injections along with their effect. A treatment that helped for three weeks tells us something a scan cannot.

The trip is under half an hour, close enough to follow a concussion properly with a graded return to activity rather than a single set of instructions.

We also see patients from Crestwood, Kirkwood and Fenton. The full list is on areas we serve.

To book, call or text us. Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. We are at 12174 Natural Bridge Rd, Suite 110, St. Louis, MO 63044 — about 28 minutes from Sunset Hills, St. Louis County. No referral is needed to book and no attorney is needed to be treated after an accident.

Why are concussion symptoms missed after a crash?

A concussion does not require losing consciousness, and most do not involve it. It also does not show on a CT scan, which is imaging designed to find bleeding and fracture rather than the functional disturbance a concussion represents.

That combination produces a familiar sequence: a patient is assessed after a collision, told the scan is clear, and discharged. The headaches, difficulty concentrating, light sensitivity, poor sleep and irritability that follow are then attributed to stress.

Symptoms overlapping with the neck complicate it further, because a collision that concusses also strains the cervical spine, and headache, dizziness and difficulty concentrating can arise from either. Separating the two is part of the assessment, since the treatments differ.