Preventing Leg Injuries with Chiropractic

When playing activities that demand a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not uncommon to sustain some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many athletes have found themselves out of commission. Dr. Messerschmidt has seen all of these problems in our Juneau, AK patients. The good news is, chiropractic can help prevent some of these injuries from occurring and research proves it.

Dr. Messerschmidt keeps up-to-date with all of the latest scientific research, and in a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, researchers from Macquarie University in Australia studied 59 semi-elite Australian Rules football players. Roughly one-half were placed in a control group and the others were put in a therapy group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant getting care once every week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before reducing those to one visit monthly for the final three months of the study.

Researchers noted that there was a "significant" difference in the number of lower limb strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. Furthermore, they noticed that the subjects who received chiropractic also had fewer weeks of missed practice and games as a result of non-contact knee injuries. This led them to determine that sports chiropractic intervention should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports team in the United States and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their athletes, because they know that chiropractic works. If you live near our office in Juneau, AK and would like to see if Dr. Messerschmidt can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (907) 789-1344 for an appointment.

Reference

Hoskins W, Pollard H. 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 2010;11(64).