We come across a large number of sports injuries in our Redondo Beach office, and Dr. Kaden is generally able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children aged 14 and younger are hurt each year while playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults injured each year while engaged in sports-related activities, as reported by statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can start to see the necessity of preventing these types of common injuries. One way to potentially realize that goal, as reported by a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive regular chiropractic treatments.
In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg injuries are common, frequently sidelining the players and impacting their team’s chance at winning. One specific study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see how well chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them in the game.
For this study specifically, all of the players received medical treatment. Furthermore, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of one treatment each week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly treatments for the following three months, and one treatment per month for the last 3 months of the study. The remaining half had no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic care.
After 24 matches, specialists noted a lessened amount of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Moreover, 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 lessen the quantity of leg injuries.
If you or your child plays sports and you would like to make sure greater time is dedicated on the field as opposed to on the sidelines, call our Redondo Beach office at (310) 251-0862 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.
