Studies Show Chiropractic Care Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We see a lot of sports injuries in our Memphis office, and Dr. Amodeo is often able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children aged 14 and below are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the almost 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 begin to see the importance of preventing these sorts of common injuries. One approach to potentially realize that goal, as stated in a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive routine chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg injuries are commonplace, often sidelining the players and affecting their team's likelihood of securing a win. One particular study was administered using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see if chiropractic could diminish these injuries and help keep them in the game.

For this study in particular, all of the players received medical treatment. In addition, half of them also received chiropractic treatments at the rate of 1 session each week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly treatments for the next three months, and one treatment a month for the last three months of the study. The remaining group were given no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic care.

After 24 matches, specialists noted a diminished number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Furthermore, 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 effectively reduce the number of leg injuries.

If you or your child plays sports and you would like to make sure more time is dedicated 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.