Studies Show Chiropractic Adjustments Effective at Preventing Sports Injuries

We come across a good deal of sports injuries in our Parma, Middleburg Heights office, and Baker Chiropractic Wellness Center is often able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that more than 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and below are hurt each year when playing sports. Add that to the nearly 2 million adults injured annually while participating in sports-related activities, according to statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and you can begin to see the necessity of preventing these sorts of widespread injuries. One approach to possible achieve that goal, as reported by a study released in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive regular chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are common, often sidelining the players and affecting their team's likelihood of winning. One specific study was administered using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see whether chiropractic could diminish these injuries and help keep them in the game.

For this study particularly, every one of the players was given medical treatment. Furthermore, half of them also engaged in chiropractic sessions at the rate of one session each week for the first six weeks, biweekly sessions for the next three months, and one treatment per month for the final three months of the study. The other participants were given no chiropractic intervention at all and were used as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic.

After twenty-four matches, scientists noted a reduced number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Moreover, that same group also missed fewer matches correlated to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to come to the conclusion that chiropractic should be added to sports training programs to dramatically decrease the quantity of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you would like to ensure greater time is spent on the field as opposed to on the bench, call our Parma, Middleburg Heights office at (440) 888-6979 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.