Sports Injuries and Chiropractic: Leg Injury

When performing sports activities that demand a lot of lower body movement, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's common to sustain some type of injury to your hips or legs. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many athletes have found themselves sidelined. Dr. Messerschmidt has seen all of these problems in our Juneau, AK patients. The good news is, chiropractic care can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

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

Researchers noted that there was a "significant" decrease in the number of leg strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. Furthermore, they observed that the subjects who engaged in chiropractic also had fewer weeks of missed practice and games as a result of non-contact knee injuries. This led them to conclude that sports chiropractic treatment 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 practice 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.

Study Information

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).