Can you recover from a neck snap without permanent injury?

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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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