Chiropractic doctors successfully treat most musculoskeletal injuries. Reduced to simple English, musculoskeletal injury means injury involving the muscles,bones, ligaments, and joints the kind of injuries that happen to just about everybody at some time or other.
Discussed here are seven levels of musculoskeletal injuries chiropractic doctors routinely treat. Vertebral misalignments (subluxations) and pinched spinal nerves requiring chiropractic expertise may be involved with any of these injuries.
LEVEL ONE – MODERATE TO SEVERE MUSCLE STRAINS AND LIGAMENT SPRAINS.
Can be deceiving with far more damage than at first apparent … so victim may not take proper precautions during healing process. In some cases, victim may not get immediate chiropractic care and no rehabilitative care whatever, thus reinjury is common due to residual weakness.
LEVEL TWO – MILD MUSCLE STRAINS AND LIGAMENT SPRAINS.
The seeming mildness of injury tends to fool victim into not getting chiropractic care. Thus, victim also fails to get the chiropractic rehabilitative care usually necessary to bring the injured part back to its pre-injury strength, resiliency, elasticity. Victim may lose full range of motion in affected joint and may lose tissue elasticity. Unattended, these mild injuries often leave a lifelong weakness in a wrist,ankle, knee or other part.
LEVEL THREESUPERIMPOSED INJURIES.
Usually means two (or more) consecutive injuries to the same general area where the second injury occurs before the first injury is fully healed. That uperimposes one injury-on the other and the damage caused by each injury is compounded or worsened. Makes both injuries slower to respond to treatment. Final healing is likely to be less complete than if either injury had occurred alone.
LEVEL FOUR – RECURRENT INJURIES.
Most often occur when an activity with injury potential is repeated over and over as in the playing of basketball or football. For example, ankle and knee injuries often happen to players who must repeatedly put themselves in potentially dangerous situations just by the nature of the game.
LEVEL FIVE – OVERUSE INJURIES.
The word “overuse” tells it all. Almost any ongoing, repetitive irritation, stress, strain, sprain, physical tension, prolonged tautness, or pressure can produce an overuse injury. Many overuse injuries are related to sports and exercise and work generates a lot of overuse injuries, too.
LEVEL SIX – MICROTRAUMA.
Micro means “very small.” Thus, “microtraumas” involving the muscles, ligaments, tendons, or cartilages are very small injuries, so small the victims may not realize injury has taken place. They can come about through everyday activities done in a mildly stressful fashion. Sometimes just sitting the wrong way can bring on a microtrauma, especially to the spine. Repeated time and again, microtraumatic injuries can develop into overuse injuries.
LEVEL SEVEN – ERGONOMIC INJURIES.
Means a worker’s physical needs are ignored in getting a job done and injury results. Most often come from an activity requiring the person to hold the same position too long, such as many hours at the computer or typewriter, or working in an awkward or cramped position. Other commonplace events such as sleeping repeatedly in a cramped position can cause ergonomic injury, too.
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