We encounter a good deal of sports injuries in our Highland Park, Saint Paul, Minnesota office, and Robert C Slater, DC is usually able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that over 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and below are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults injured annually 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 minimizing these sorts of common injuries. One approach to possible realize that goal, as reported by a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive 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 winning. One particular study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see if chiropractic could cut down on these injuries and help keep them playing.
For this study specifically, all of the players was given medical treatment. Furthermore, half of them also engaged in chiropractic treatments at the rate of 1 session each week for the first six weeks, biweekly sessions for the next three months, and one treatment each month for the last 3 months of the study. The remaining half were given no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic.
After 24 matches, scientists noticed a reduced number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Moreover, that same group also missed fewer matches connected 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.
If you or your child plays sports and you want to make sure more time is spent on the field as opposed to on the sidelines, call our Highland Park, Saint Paul, Minnesota office at (651) 699-3366 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.
