Sports Injuries and Chiropractic: Leg Injury

When performing sports activities that require a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not at all uncommon to suffer 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 patients. The good news is, chiropractic care can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

Dr. Ernst keeps up-to-date with all of the latest scientific research, and in a report 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 others were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant receiving care once a 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.

Researchers noted that there was a "significant" difference in the number of leg 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 determine that sports chiropractic treatment should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports team in the United States and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their athletes, because they know that chiropractic really works. If you live near our office in Arlington 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).