Chiropractic Care and Sports Injuries

We encounter a lot of sports injuries in our New York office, and Frank J. Valente, DC, PC is often able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that over 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and younger are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults hurt every year while participating in sports-related activities, according to statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the necessity of minimizing 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 care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are common, often sidelining the players and impacting their team's odds of securing a win. One specific study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see whether chiropractic could diminish these injuries and help keep them playing.

For this study in particular, every one of the participants received medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also received chiropractic sessions at the rate of 1 session each week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly sessions for the following three months, and one treatment a month for the remaining 3 months of the study. The remaining half were given no chiropractic intervention at all and acted as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic.

Following 24 matches, scientists noticed a reduced number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Moreover, that very group also missed fewer matches connected to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to conclude that chiropractic ought to be made an addition to sports training programs to effectively decrease the quantity of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you would like to make sure greater time is spent on the field as opposed to on the sidelines, call our New York office at (917) 338-7917 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.