Research Shows Chiropractic Adjustments Effective at Preventing Sports Injuries

We encounter a lot of sports injuries in our Arlington, WA office, and Dr. Ernst is generally able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and younger are injured each year when playing sports. Add that to the nearly 2 million adults injured every year while engaged in sports-related activities, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the necessity of preventing these types of common injuries. One way to potentially realize that goal, according to a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic treatments.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are commonplace, often sidelining the players and affecting their team's chance at winning. One particular study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see how well chiropractic could diminish these injuries and help keep them playing.

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

After twenty-four matches, specialists noted a diminished amount of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Furthermore, that same group also missed fewer matches connected to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to conclude that chiropractic ought to be added to sports training programs to effectively lessen the number of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you would like to make sure more time is spent on the field versus on the sidelines, call our Arlington, WA office at (360) 659-8464 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.