Preventing Leg Injuries with Chiropractic

When performing sports that require a lot of lower body movement, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not at all 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. Palmer has seen all of these problems in our Depew patients. Fortunately, chiropractic care can help prevent some of these injuries from occurring and research proves it.

Dr. Palmer keeps current with all of the recent 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 half were placed in a control group and the other half were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant getting care once a 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 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 conclude 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 really works. If you live near our office in Depew and would like to see if Dr. 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).