When playing sports that demand a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's common to suffer some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many athletes have found themselves sidelined. Oregon Medical Centers has seen all of these problems in our Aloha, Beaverton patients. Fortunately, chiropractic can help prevent some of these injuries from occurring and research proves it.
Oregon Medical Centers keeps current 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 footballers. 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 every week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before decreasing those to one visit monthly for the final three months of the study.
The authors noted that there was a "significant" difference in the number of leg strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. Furthermore, they noticed that the subjects who received 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 intervention should be added to "the current best practice management."
Every major sports team 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 practice in Aloha, Beaverton and would like to see if Oregon Medical Centers can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (503) 642-2845 for an appointment.
Study Information
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).