Chiropractor Ken Frederick Discusses Sports Injuries And Chiropractic Care

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Chiropractors.Media

Sports injuries. The kind of injuries that we have been talking about, obviously whiplash, car accident, let’s say somebody has low back pain, they’ve… spring and summer being outside, I would assume more people have accidents because of the increased physical activity, et cetera, et cetera. But sports injuries are a whole different category in and of itself. And so tell me a little bit about that.

Ken Frederick – Chiropractor – Port Orchard, Washington

Well, sports injuries for the most part are always going to be a sprain or a strain, which is essentially… yeah, an overstretch injury. Whenever there’s an overstretch, there’s always tissue that has tears. The body’s initial response to that kind of injury is swelling. And the purpose of the swelling, you know, it has a couple of stages. One is proliferation and then remodeling. What happens is as the tissue swells, as the blood flow increases, and more blood comes in, little chemicals come in, collagen is delivered to the area, and then the remodeling phase happens. And that can take up to a year to happen.

As a chiropractor, how I address that is with a lot of education, for starters. The first thing is ice. Many of my patients show up going, yeah, I’ve been using heat. And I say, how long have you been doing this? Well, it’s been like a couple of weeks now. And I said, is it still swollen? Well, yes, it is. Does it still hurt? Yes, it does.

And that’s when I tell them that, well, heat promotes blood flow. It’s going to swell more. It will take longer for swelling to come down. It’s going to hurt more. It will take longer to heal. You will have more scar tissue than you need. And of course, scar tissue is not stretchable, right? There will be limited range of motion. And we also know scar tissue only grows one kind of nerve, a pain nerve.

So, the education is ice for sports injuries all the way, even low back injuries. It’s ice, ice, ice. I always tell my patient, I know heat feels good, but it’s an evil trick by Satan. So, ultimately the patient gets it. And ice doesn’t feel great the first 3 minutes. There are 3 stages to icing. It’s stinging, burning, and aching. And they all last between a minute to two minutes each. But after that, ice feels better than heat. So icing is rule #1 for all sports injuries.