Studies Show Chiropractic Care Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We encounter a large number of sports injuries in our Mt Sterling clinic, and Dr. Tolson is often able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children aged 14 and below are injured each year when playing sports. Add that to the almost 2 million adults injured each year while engaged in sports-related activities, as reported by statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the importance of minimizing these types of common injuries. One approach to possible realize that goal, as stated in a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg injuries are common, frequently sidelining the players and affecting their team's chance at winning. One particular study was administered using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see if chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them playing.

For this study in particular, all of the players got medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of one session per week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly sessions for the next three months, and one session per month for the last three months of the study. The remaining half had no chiropractic intervention at all and acted as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic.

After twenty-four matches, specialists noticed a diminished number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Additionally, that same group also missed fewer matches related to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to come to the conclusion that chiropractic ought to be added to sports training programs to dramatically lessen the quantity of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you want to ensure more time is dedicated on the field as opposed to on the bench, call our Mt Sterling office at (859) 499-1009 and schedule 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.