Studies Show Chiropractic Beneficial at Preventing Sports Injuries

We encounter a lot of sports injuries in our Naperville, IL clinic, and Frank Bendiks, DC, PC is often able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that over 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and below are injured each year while playing sports. Add that to the close to 2 million adults injured every year while participating in sports-related activities, according to statistics compiled 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 potentially achieve that goal, as reported by a study published 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 impacting their team's odds of securing a win. One particular study was conducted using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see how well chiropractic could diminish these injuries and help keep them in the game.

For this study specifically, every one of the volunteers was given medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also engaged in chiropractic treatments at the rate of 1 session per week for the first six weeks, biweekly treatments for the next three months, and one session each month for the final three months of the study. The remaining half were given no chiropractic intervention at all and acted as the control group to determine the benefits of chiropractic care.

Following 24 matches, specialists reported a lessened 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 conclude that chiropractic should be added to sports training programs to dramatically decrease the quantity of leg injuries.

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 sidelines, call our Naperville, IL office at (630) 301-0054 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.