Research Shows Chiropractic Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We come across a good deal of sports injuries in our Juneau, AK clinic, and Dr. Messerschmidt is often able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that over 3.5 million children aged 14 and below are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the nearly 2 million adults hurt annually while engaged 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 minimizing these types of common injuries. One way to potentially achieve that goal, as stated in a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg injuries are common, frequently sidelining the players and affecting their team's chance at securing a win. One specific study was administered 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 particularly, all of the participants was given medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also received chiropractic treatments at the rate of one treatment per week for the first six weeks, biweekly sessions for the following three months, and one treatment a month for the final 3 months of the study. The remaining participants had no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and acted as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic care.

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

If you or your child are active in sports and you would like to make sure more time is spent on the field versus on the bench, call our Juneau, AK office at (907) 789-1344 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.