Studies Show Chiropractic Care Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We encounter a large number of sports injuries in our Arlington, WA clinic, and Dr. Ernst is generally able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children aged 14 and younger are hurt each year while playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults hurt annually while participating in sports-related activities, as reported by statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the necessity of minimizing these sorts of common injuries. One approach to potentially achieve 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 traumas are commonplace, often sidelining the players and affecting their team's odds of securing a win. 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 particularly, all of the participants received medical treatment. Furthermore, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of 1 treatment per week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly treatments for the following three months, and one treatment per month for the remaining three months of the study. The other half had no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic adjustments.

After twenty-four matches, researchers noticed a diminished number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received 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 should be made an addition to sports training programs to dramatically reduce the quantity 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 as opposed to 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.