Research Shows Chiropractic Care Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We come across a large number of sports injuries in our Gadsden, AL office, and Gadsden Family Chiropractic is often able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that more than 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and below are hurt each year when playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults injured annually while engaged in sports-related activities, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the importance of minimizing these sorts of common injuries. One approach to potentially achieve that goal, as reported by a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic treatments.

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

For this study particularly, all of the participants was given medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also engaged in chiropractic sessions at the rate of one session per week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly sessions for the next three months, and one treatment per month for the remaining three months of the study. The remaining participants were given no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and acted as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic care.

Following 24 matches, specialists noticed a diminished number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Additionally, that very group also missed fewer matches related to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to come to the conclusion that chiropractic should be added to sports training programs to effectively reduce the amount of leg injuries.

If you or your child plays sports and you would like to make sure more time is dedicated on the field versus on the sidelines, call our Gadsden, AL office at (256) 543-3033 and schedule 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.