Preventing Leg Injuries with Chiropractic

When playing sports activities that require a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not at all uncommon to suffer some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many players have found themselves out of commission. Dr. Pittman has seen all of these problems in our San Angelo patients. Fortunately, chiropractic care can help prevent some of these injuries from occurring and research proves it.

Dr. Pittman keeps up-to-date with all of the latest scientific research, and in a report published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, researchers from Macquarie University in Australia studied 59 semi-elite Australian Rules football players. Roughly one-half were placed in a control group and the other half were put in a therapy group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant getting care once a week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before reducing those to one visit monthly for the final three months of the study.

The authors noted that there was a "significant" decrease in the number of lower limb strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. In addition, they observed that the subjects who engaged in chiropractic also had fewer weeks of missed practice and games as a result of non-contact knee injuries. This led them to determine that sports chiropractic treatment should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports organization in the US and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their athletes, because they know that chiropractic works. If you live near our office in San Angelo and would like to see if Dr. Pittman can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (325) 223-9355 for an appointment.

Reference

Hoskins W, Pollard H. 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 2010;11(64).