Studies Show Chiropractic Adjustments Effective at Preventing Sports Injuries

We encounter a lot of sports injuries in our Woburn office, and Dr. Ellis is generally 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 almost 2 million adults injured every year while engaged 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 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 routine chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are common, frequently sidelining the players and affecting their team's odds of winning. One specific study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see how well chiropractic could cut down on these injuries and help keep them in the game.

Research Shows Chiropractic Helps in Treating Sports Injuries

For this study particularly, every one of the participants was given medical treatment. Furthermore, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of one treatment per week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly sessions for the next three months, and one treatment each month for the last 3 months of the study. The other participants had no chiropractic intervention at all and were used as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic.

After twenty-four matches, researchers noticed a diminished number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Furthermore, that same group also missed fewer matches connected to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to conclude that chiropractic should be made an addition to sports training programs to effectively reduce the quantity of leg injuries.

Dr. Ellis Can Help Patients Find Relief From Sports Injuries & Help You Recover Faster

If you or your child plays sports and you would like to ensure greater time is spent on the field as opposed to on the bench, call our Woburn office at (781) 460-0939 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.