Athletes need to recover faster. Is chiropractic the answer?

Sports are an important and oftentimes cherished part of U.S. culture, with Statista reporting that the average National Football League (NFL) game draws in almost 70,000 attendees.

Major League Baseball (MLB) and Major League Soccer (MLS) collect the next biggest crowds, with roughly 30,000 and 22,000 seats filled per game, respectively.

And though some people prefer to watch their favorite sports from the comfort of their own homes or in a seat at their local stadium or field, others like to take a more active role and actually get in on the play. In fact, another Statista survey found that 95.8 percent of all adult Americans are engaged in some type of leisure or sport activity, with men participating slightly more often than women (though just by 1.1 percent).

Kids are getting in on the action to as, according to Statistic Brain, more than 36.2 million kids play in organized sports annually. This is even though 87 percent of the parents have some level of worry about the injuries this younger generation may sustain. As it turns out, their worries are well-founded.

Sports injury statistics

Out of the 36.2 million kids playing sports, more than 2.6 million wind up in hospital emergency rooms annually says Safe Kids. Basketball tends to result in the greatest number of injuries as it’s responsible for 359,300 of the visits, with football coming in a close second, sending 354,300 kids in search of medical care per year. Other sports that really drive the injury numbers up include soccer and baseball.

As if these numbers aren’t bad enough, even more injuries are tended to in doctor’s offices and offices of other health practitioners, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicating that these less emergent options see a full 50 percent of recreation-related injuries annually. Further, a majority of the injuries involve the lower extremity (42 percent), with upper extremities being not far behind (30.3 percent), and injuries to the head and neck a third common concern (16.4 percent).

Safe Kids adds that the sports injuries seen most often by health practitioners of all varieties include sprains, strains, repetitive motion injuries, and injuries associated to excessive heat. And if a child participates in more than one sport that utilizes the same body part (such as gymnastics and running track, both of which use their legs), their risk of overuse injuries increases.

While the most effective type of treatment is dependent on the actual sports injury sustained, many research studies have found that chiropractic care can help speed up the recovery time, enabling these athletes to get back in the game more quickly.

Chiropractic can speed up recovery time

For instance, a 2010 study published by BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders involved 59 semi-elite Australian football players split into two groups. One group received best practice medical and sports science management and the other received best practice care in addition to sports chiropractic. Upon conclusion of the two-phase, 30-week study, researchers found “a significant difference in weeks missed due to non-contact knee injury” between the two.

Specifically, the average number of weeks missed by an injured player in the best practice only group was 21 whereas the number of weeks missed by an injured player who also received chiropractic care was only four. When the injury was non-contact, the difference was even greater, with the best practice only group missing 24 weeks and the chiropractic plus best practice group missing just one.

Depending on the length of the season, chiropractic may be the difference between playing and sitting on the bench until the next year.

Participating in sports offers players a number of benefits, some of them mental and some of them physical. Therefore, the quicker he or she can return to the sport or sports enjoyed the most, the better they’ll feel all the way around. Chiropractic can help achieve that goal, providing real value to the people who find that participating in sports is more exciting than merely watching them.