Sports Injuries and Chiropractic: Leg Injury

When playing activities that require a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not at all uncommon to sustain some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many people have found themselves sidelined. Dr. Ernst has seen all of these problems in our Arlington, WA patients. Fortunately, chiropractic adjustments can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

Dr. Ernst keeps current with all of the recent scientific research, and in a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, researchers from Macquarie University in Australia studied 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers. Roughly half were placed in a control group and the other half were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant receiving care once per week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before reducing those to one visit monthly for the final three months of the study.

The authors noted that there was a "significant" difference in the number of lower limb strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. In addition, they observed that the subjects who received chiropractic also had fewer weeks of missed practice and games as a result of non-contact knee injuries. This led them to conclude that sports chiropractic intervention should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports organization in the US and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their players, because they know that chiropractic really works. If you live near our office in Arlington, WA and would like to see if Dr. Ernst can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (360) 659-8464 for an appointment.

Reference

Hoskins W, Pollard H. 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 2010;11(64).