We see a good deal of sports injuries in our Noblesville clinic, and Dr. Dahlager is usually able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital states that more than 3.5 million children aged 14 and below are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults hurt every 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 widespread injuries. One way to possible achieve that goal, as stated in a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to receive routine chiropractic care.

In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg traumas are common, often 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 if chiropractic could cut down on these injuries and help keep them in the game.

For this study particularly, every one of the volunteers was given medical treatment. In addition, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of 1 session each week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly sessions for the next three months, and one treatment a month for the last three months of the study. The other half had no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic care.

Following 24 matches, specialists noticed a reduced number of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Moreover, that same group also missed fewer matches correlated to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to conclude that chiropractic ought to be made an addition to sports training programs to dramatically reduce the amount of leg injuries.

If you or your child are active in sports and you want to make sure greater time is spent on the field versus on the sidelines, call our Noblesville office at (317) 214-7218 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.