Scientifically it's valid, and good scientists and doctors would immediately pick up on the nuance.

The issue is shameless "science" reporting like this which packages up the results for non experts, without explaining the nuance because they know the sensational headlines will get more attention, and they know non-expert readers will get scared and share the article on places like HN or Facebook.

It's such an obvious play: find one doctor who'll make a loaded statement with the word "whiplash", write on this one study as if it's gospel truth, get everyone reading it as scared as possible. Throw in links to other emotional articles like "Can you die of a broken heart?" throughout the text to trigger secondary emotional reactions that will get confused with the main ones. Boom, social media sharing heaven, who cares if the science was valid or not?

And to be clear, the science underneath might be valid, probably even is, but it would need the expertise of someone who understands statistics and medicine to decide whether you should take action based on this or not.