“You have injuries that bother you when you’re not playing. When that horn blows, you don’t feel it.” said a professional athlete in regards to playing through pain during his basketball season. That may be a great plan for him but if we are being honest, our bodies experience pain as a way of signaling to us to say, “whah, Nelly, let’s take it easy!” And shouldn’t we listen? In the United States there are 30 million minors who participate in organized sports, and more than 3.5 million injuries each year, which usually means 3.5 million kids sit out for a season or a few games.
In fact, almost 33% of injuries that children suffer happen while playing sports. Kids from 5 to 14 years old account for about 40% of sports injuries at hospitals. As children get older, they present more and more serious injuries. If a 5 year old sits out from soccer practice for five days and his or her injury isn’t even that serious, shouldn’t professional athletes take note and give themselves time to heal? Weren’t they once children who did just that to stay healthy?
One ticket to getting back into the game is physical and sports medicine and rehabilitation. Pain management activities like sports physical therapy have done wonders to strengthen the human body and keep it playing at full force. Physical therapy restores a person’s capability to be active through minimizing physical impairment, injury-related congenital and acquired conditions, and functional limitations. People utilize physical therapy for both kinds of sports injuries: acute and chronic. Acute injuries happen suddenly while chronic injuries develop over time. For example, a runner may have a chronic injury in their knees from the constant pounding. This would be considered a chronic injury. However, if a runner were to fall and twist their ankle, that would be an acute injury.
Physical and sports medicine and rehabilitation is a great way to bounce back fro either of these scenarios. And when that fails, joint replace is often a course of action. But the fact still remains, our bodies send us these wonder and clear messages of pain when we need to take it easy? Why over step those messages and head down a slippery slop of physical therapy activities and eventual joint replacement? It’s not hard to find physical therapist and get into physical and sports medicine and rehabilitation but it is hard to swallow your treatment as you remember that this all could have been avoided with just a little rest! References.