We encounter a lot of sports injuries in our North County, St. Louis, MO office, and Dr. Mark Holland is often able to assist these athletes. Stanford Children’s Hospital reports that more than 3.5 million children of the ages 14 and below are hurt each year while playing sports. Add that to the nearly 2 million adults hurt annually 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 minimizing these sorts of common injuries. One way to potentially achieve that goal, as reported by a study published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, is to engage in regular chiropractic treatments.
In Australian Rules football, hamstring and other leg injuries are commonplace, frequently sidelining the players and affecting their team's chance at winning. One specific study was administered using 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers to see how well chiropractic could reduce these injuries and help keep them in the game.
For this study particularly, every one of the participants got medical treatment. Additionally, half of them also were given chiropractic sessions at the rate of 1 treatment per week for the first 6 weeks, biweekly treatments for the next three months, and one treatment per month for the final 3 months of the study. The remaining half were given no chiropractic intervention whatsoever and were used as the control group to assess the benefits of chiropractic.
After twenty-four matches, specialists noted a reduced amount of lower limb muscle strains in the group that had been given chiropractic care. Moreover, that very group also missed fewer matches connected to non-contact knee injuries. This lead the researchers to come to the conclusion that chiropractic should be added to sports training programs to dramatically reduce the number of leg injuries.
If you or your child are active in sports and you want to ensure more time is spent on the field versus on the sidelines, call our North County, St. Louis, MO office at (314) 867-8888 and make an appointment today. We will do our best to keep you in the game!
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