Chiropractic Care and Sports Injuries

We encounter a large number of sports injuries in our Moon Township clinic, and Dr. Spiropoulos is usually able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that more than 3.5 million children aged 14 and younger are hurt each year when playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults hurt annually while participating in sports-related activities, according to statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the necessity of preventing these sorts of common injuries. One way to potentially achieve that goal, as reported by a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive regular chiropractic treatments.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are commonplace, frequently sidelining the players and impacting their team's likelihood of winning. One specific study was administered using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see whether chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them playing.

For this study in particular, every one of the volunteers was given medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also received chiropractic treatments at the rate of one treatment per week for the first six weeks, biweekly sessions for the following three months, and one session a month for the last three months of the study. The other group were given no chiropractic intervention at all and acted as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic.

Following 24 matches, scientists noticed a reduced number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Furthermore, that very group also missed fewer matches connected to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to come to the conclusion that chiropractic should be added to sports training programs to dramatically lessen the amount of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you want to ensure more time is spent on the field versus on the bench, call our Moon Township office at (724) 513-0521 and make an appointment today. We will do our best to keep you in the game!

References

• Hoskins, W, & Pollard, H. (2010, April 8). The effect of a sports chiropractic manual therapy intervention on the prevention of back pain, hamstring and lower limb injuries in semi-elite Australian Rules footballers: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 11(64), doi:10.1186/1471-2474-11-64
• Misra, A. (2014, March 17). Common sports injuries: Incidence and average charges. Department of Health & Human Services.
• Stanford Children’s Hospital. (n.d.). Sports injury statistics.