Research Shows Chiropractic Care Effective at Preventing Sports Injuries

We see a good deal of sports injuries in our Midtown, New York, NY clinic, and Dr. Vinh Tran, DC, CCSP is usually able to help these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and younger are hurt each year when playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults injured each year while taking part 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 minimizing these sorts of common injuries. One approach to possible achieve that goal, according to a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive routine chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg injuries are commonplace, frequently sidelining the players and affecting their team's odds of securing a win. One specific study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see if chiropractic could diminish these injuries and help keep them playing.

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

Following twenty-four matches, researchers reported a diminished number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had received chiropractic care. Moreover, that same 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 decrease the quantity 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 bench, call our Midtown, New York, NY office at (212) 729-0856 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.