So I know the neck snap killing is just hollywood magic and in an old post someone said its extremely hard to do even if you are a weightlifter. Im just curious that if someone tried and fumbled or you had an accident to cause such a similar neck injury would you be able to recover without issue or can it lead to paralysis?
In: Biology
It’s all about the spinal cord. If it’s intact, all the communication between the brain and the rest of the body will still work. If it’s partially severed, some communication gets through. And if it’s fully cut, no communication gets through. That communication consists of sensory input to the brain a well as commands from the brain out to other parts of the body. Some of the most important communication is the directives to the muscles around the lungs to draw in air. Which muscles get their information depends on where on the spinal cord gets cut. Too high and the brain can no longer tell any of the breathing muscles to do their jobs – that means that the patient dies if they don’t get immediate medical care.
Traumatic injury to the spine often severs the spinal cord. When it doesn’t, moving the neck around afterwards can cause the broken bones in the neck to cut the spinal cord. If, on the other hand, the neck breaks and the spinal cord doesn’t get injured (initially or by any subsequent movement), proper medical care can allow the spine to heal while keeping the cord healthy and connected.
More people survive broken necks than don’t, at least the ones that come into my ER. And paralysis can come in a lot of levels. You can have anything from some minor bruising to your spinal cord that you recover from, up to severing it high in the neck, where you won’t be able to even breathe.
This is because not every broken next severs the spinal cord.
However , it hurts, and you can pinch the nerves that exit laterally from the spinal cord. It’s easy to do some level of damage to the neck. If either fractures or bad soft tissue injuries (ligaments) are left untreated, they create instabilities in the spine that will eventually pinch, cut, or otherwise damage spinal cord directly. Even bulged disks can be on the nerve roots, or pushing into the spinal cord itself.
So letting things heal on their own can be dangerous. But if you got surgery or immobilization with the neck brace while it heals , you can improve your chance as a lot.
Broken neck and back here. 6 weeks with a brace but no surgeries due to clean fractures. I did have to have my collarbone operated on though as it went inward and almost pierced my heart. Lucky to be alive, let alone walking from where I broke my neck. Feels fine, but there are definitely days where I can hear the crunching when I move my neck. Don’t have a seizure at the top of the stairs. Definitely don’t recommend it!
There is a famous scene of a famous actor breaking his neck *on screen* and then continuing the show (after giving it a rest for the day). It wasn’t until years later, when he was examined for a different reason, that he *even noticed* (beyond the pain in those first few weeks). [Buster Keaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Keaton) was a strange individual that way (ctrl-f for ‘neck’ in the wiki article, or for the [specific movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Jr.) for more details).
Now, his injury was pretty specifically an impact against the neck, so it might not ‘count’ because there was no twisting involved. I also don’t know *exactly* how intense Keaton’s injury was (9 years between the injury and the diagnosis means he probably didn’t either). But the basic idea of ‘broken neck = paralysis’ is flawed.
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