Studies Show Chiropractic Adjustments Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We come across a good deal of sports injuries in our Depew office, and Dr. Palmer is often able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that more than 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and younger are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the almost 2 million adults hurt every year while participating in sports-related activities, as reported by statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the necessity of minimizing these sorts of widespread injuries. One way to possible achieve that goal, according to a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic treatments.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are common, often sidelining the players and impacting their team's chance at securing a win. One particular study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see if chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them in the game.

For this study particularly, all of the participants was given medical treatment. In addition, half of them also engaged in chiropractic treatments at the rate of 1 session per week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly treatments for the following three months, and one treatment each month for the remaining three months of the study. The remaining half were given no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and acted as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic.

After twenty-four matches, researchers noted a lessened number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Moreover, that very group also missed fewer matches correlated to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to come to the conclusion that chiropractic should be made an addition to sports training programs to effectively lessen the number of leg injuries.

If you or your child plays sports and you would like to make sure greater time is spent on the field as opposed to on the sidelines, call our Depew office at (716) 668-2225 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.