Studies Show Chiropractic Care Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We encounter a lot of sports injuries in our Depew / Lancaster clinic, and Dr. William Palmer is often able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that over 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and younger are hurt each year when playing sports. Add that to the nearly 2 million adults injured annually while participating in sports-related activities, as reported by statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can begin to see the necessity of preventing these sorts of widespread injuries. One approach to potentially realize that goal, according to a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive regular chiropractic treatments.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are commonplace, often sidelining the players and impacting their team's chance at winning. One particular study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see how well chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them in the game.

For this study specifically, all of the participants was given medical treatment. In addition, half of them also received chiropractic sessions at the rate of one session each week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly sessions for the following three months, and one treatment each month for the last 3 months of the study. The other participants had no chiropractic intervention at all and were used as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic adjustments.

After twenty-four matches, specialists noted a lessened amount of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Furthermore, that very 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 amount of leg injuries.

If you or your child plays sports and you would like to ensure more time is spent on the field versus on the sidelines, call our Depew / Lancaster office at (716) 668-2225 and schedule 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.