Sports Injuries and Chiropractic: Leg Injury

When performing sports activities that demand a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's common to sustain some type of injury to your hips or legs. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many athletes have found themselves sidelined. Drs. Ken Haycock & Tim Vierheller has seen all of these problems in our Massillon, OH patients. Fortunately, chiropractic care can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

Drs. Ken Haycock & Tim Vierheller 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 others were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant engaging in care once per 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 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 conclude that sports chiropractic treatment 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 really works. If you live near our office in Massillon, OH and would like to see if Drs. Ken Haycock & Tim Vierheller can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (330) 833-2085 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).