Sports injuries used to be pretty much confined to youngsters and professional athletes. Nowadays, though, you never know who will show up at the chiropractor’s office suffering from some kind of sports or recreational injury. It could be a grandmother power walker as readily as a teenage basketball player.
EVERYBODY’S DOING IT
And no wonder. It seems that just about everyone is caught up in the excitement of getting and staying fit as well as having a lot of fun from physical activity.
Countless millions of adults-persons who used to do nothing more than watch TV-now jog, run, hike. Millions walk regularly. Then there’s church and community softball, basketball, and volleyball teams. Youngsters in every city, town, and hamlet play Little League baseball while virtually every high school and college in the country fields a football and basketball team. All this while thousands of racquetball and physical fitness centers cater to millions of enthusiastic patrons. Nor should we leave out skateboarders, bicyclists, tennis players, jazzercisers, and aerobic dancers. You name it.
MOTION MAY LEAD TO INJURY
While chiropractic doctors applaud the health benefits of physical activity, they point out that whenever there is an increase in bodily movement, the possibility of musculoskeletal injury increases dramatically. So they are saying: have fun, but be careful. The past decade of increased physical activity has led to millions more sports injuries per year in the United States than ever before.
If you are at all physically active, chiropractors point out, it is nearly impossible to get through life without sustaining a sports or recreational injury of some kind at least once. Many of such injuries clearly call for chiropractic care.
SPORTS INJURIES – TV – AND CHIROPRACTIC
Chiropractic’s splendid reputation in care and treatment of sports injuries has mush-roomed during the past decade or so. Partially due to worldwide television coverage of sports events, it is becoming common knowledge that chiropractic is often the treatment of choice for sports injuries-especially those not requiring surgery.
Most people are now aware, too, that many professional college teams have a chiropractor on staff or on call to look after sports-related problems from simple sprains and strains to more serious problems resulting from intensive training and hard, competitive play.
WORD-OF-MOUTH STILL THE BEST
Although chiropractors are very appreciative of the media attention they get about their successful treatment of sports injuries, they still depend mostly on word-of-mouth praise for their treatment of those musculoskeletal injuries that can happen to any of us at home, at work, and at play.
BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY
Even mild injuries should have a chiropractic evaluation. There is no virture in building a healthy body through sports activity today if a neglected injury causes problems tomorrow.
Copyright © 2010 Health Star, Inc