Sports Injuries and Chiropractic: Leg Injury

When playing sports activities that require a lot of lower body movement, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not uncommon to suffer some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many players have found themselves sidelined. Dr. William Palmer has seen all of these problems in our Depew / Lancaster patients. The good news is, chiropractic can help prevent some of these injuries from occurring and research proves it.

Dr. William Palmer keeps current with all of the latest 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 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 engaging in care once per 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. In addition, 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 determine that sports chiropractic intervention should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports organization in the US 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 Depew / Lancaster and would like to see if Dr. William Palmer can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (716) 668-2225 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).