Sports Injuries
An active lifestyle is a great benefit to body, mind, and spirit. We want our patients to be out there and enjoying the activities they love to do without worry of pain or injury.
Sadly, we can’t always prevent every misfortune—and sometimes we even push ourselves overly hard. Traumatic and overuse sports injuries are both fairly common and can keep someone on the sidelines for a while.
Types of Sports Injuries
Not all sports injuries are the same. In the broadest of terms, they can be divided into the two categories we previously mentioned:
- Traumatic Injuries are those caused by a sudden force or impact. Broken bones, sprains, and tendon ruptures are examples of traumatic injuries.
- Overuse injuries are a result of pushing the body too hard or over too long a period without proper rest. Running is the most common example of an activity that can cause overuse injuries due to repetitive stress and pushing beyond what participants are conditioned to do, but any activity can result in overuse. Plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinitis, and stress fractures can be counted among overuse injuries.
Traumatic injuries tend to be very obvious. Most athletes understand they’ve been injured and will stop, take time off and/or seek professional help.
Overuse injuries, on the other hand, are the ones where athletics tend to get themselves into trouble as they don’t realize the seriousness of the injury. Often they will continue to push through it and cause further damage, or they make adjustments for the pain, which causes their bodies to be out of balance and sustain additional injury.
Getting Back into Action
Proper treatment of sports injuries is very important. The damaged tissue must be given an opportunity to heal, and foot and ankle strength must be rebuilt and reconditioned if necessary. This way, you can get back to your activities with less risk of re-injury.
You will more than likely need some time off from activity to recover, but that doesn’t always mean putting a stop to moving altogether. In many cases, we can discuss other forms of exercise and cross-training that can be performed during the recovery period. Much of this will of course depend on the severity of the injury. If it requires full immobilization of the area, your options will naturally be quite limited.
Basic treatment may include ice therapy and physical therapy. In some cases, corticosteroid injections may be used sparingly to reduce pain.
Consideration should be given to more advanced forms of treatment to speed healing and get you back to your activities faster. For example:
- Our Cutting Edge laser therapy can help alleviate pain and inflammation in soft tissue injuries, as well as accelerate recovery time.
- AmnioFix therapy is an injection of extracellular matrix proteins and growth factors derived from human amniotic tissue which will stimulate your bodies stem cells to accelerate healing. This treatment is combined with laser therapy for especially difficult-to-heal injuries.
Conservative methods will be effective for most sports injuries. However, surgery may be considered if the injury is severe (such as a tendon rupture) or other forms of treatment haven’t helped. We will fully discuss all options with you.
Do not try to ignore a sports injury. Some limited time away from activity is much better than a repetitive cycle of chronic pain or mobility issues caused by improper healing. Give our Carson City office a call at (775) 783-8037 to schedule an appointment with us.
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Carson City, NV 89701
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Text: (775) 783-8037
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