Research Shows Chiropractic Adjustments Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We come across a good deal of sports injuries in our Fleming Island, FL office, and Select Health and Wellness 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 nearly 2 million adults hurt every year while taking part in sports-related activities, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can begin to see the necessity of minimizing these sorts of common injuries. One approach to potentially realize that goal, according to a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are common, frequently sidelining the players and impacting their team's likelihood of winning. One particular study was administered using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see whether chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them playing.

For this study in particular, all of the volunteers received medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also engaged in 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 final 3 months of the study. The other half were given no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic care.

After 24 matches, specialists noticed a lessened 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 made an addition to sports training programs to dramatically lessen the quantity of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you would like to make sure more time is dedicated on the field as opposed to on the bench, call our Fleming Island, FL office at (904) 425-9060 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.