Studies Show Chiropractic Care Effective at Preventing Sports Injuries

We see a lot of sports injuries in our Memphis office, and Dynamic Chiropractic is usually able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that more than 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and younger are injured each year when playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults injured each year while engaged 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 widespread injuries. One approach to possible realize that goal, as reported by a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive routine chiropractic treatments.

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

Research Shows Chiropractic Helps in Treating Sports Injuries

For this study particularly, every one of the volunteers was given medical treatment. Furthermore, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of one treatment each week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly treatments for the following three months, and one treatment per month for the final three months of the study. The other group had no chiropractic intervention at all and acted as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic care.

After 24 matches, specialists noticed a reduced number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Additionally, that same group also missed fewer matches correlated to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to conclude that chiropractic should be added to sports training programs to dramatically reduce the number of leg injuries.

Dynamic Chiropractic Can Help Patients Find Comfort From Sports Injuries & Help You Recover Faster

If you or your child plays sports and you want to ensure more time is spent on the field as opposed to on the bench, call our Memphis office at (901) 757-8311 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.