Get Back in the Game Faster with Our Comprehensive Sports Medicine Approach

Every movement you make is a complex combination of actions enacted with your muscles, bones, joints, and related musculoskeletal tissue to help do everything from pick up an object from the ground to running a marathon. Normal actions we take for granted require all of these things to work correctly, and sadly, injuries are all too common for a variety of reasons. Despite commonly being referred to as sports injuries, this type of damage to the body can result from a variety of factors, including age, sex, athletic skill, and physical fitness.

Whatever the reason for an injury, there are many ways to treat them and get you back to your daily life, using sports medicine. If you live in the Fort Worth, Texas area and you’re coping with a sports injury or other orthopedic issues, Dr. Joseph Daniels and his skilled medical staff at Southwest Orthopedic Associates can help. Now let’s examine what sports medicine can do for injuries, let’s look at some common injuries you may have, what this type of treatment can do, and what methods we have available.

What are some common sports injuries?

Here’s a basic breakdown of the types of injuries people often get:

• Sprains and strains: the term for overstretching the ligaments (sprain), muscles or tendons (strain) resulting in pain and limited mobility

• Tears: ligaments, tendons, and muscles can be torn partially or completely, and often happens with the Achilles tendon or rotator cuff

• Fractures: fractures or breaks in your bones can vary in severity, and there are different types, such as acute, stress, and growth plate fractures in children

• Dislocations: when a bone is dislodged from the socket of the joint, it becomes dislocated which can also lead to stretching of muscles, tendons, and ligaments

• Bursitis: bursae are small, fluid filled sacs that act as cushions on your joints, and can cause pain and irritation once inflamed

These conditions often lead to a range of symptoms, including swelling, bruising, pain, immobility, weakness, and an inability to put weight on the affected body part. Injuries are often caused by impact, awkward movement when walking, running or turning, and can become chronic if the same area is injured repeatedly.

What can sports medicine do to help?

Also referred to as sports and exercise medicine, this is the common term for a range of treatment focusing on improving physical fitness and recovering from the many injuries listed above. To address rehabilitating an injury, sports medicine uses a combination of exercise physiology, orthopedics, sports nutrition, and biomechanics, with medical and non medical specialists helping you on the road to recovery. Depending on your injury, or physical problem, physical therapy, specialized training regimens, braces, and surgical procedures can be used to get you back to full health.

What treatments do we offer?

We have many options to help you heal from injury, including:

Physical therapy

An important step to recovery that can include other forms of treatment, physical therapy is a process to help rehabilitate an injury, disability or other problems through improving range of movement, providing more stability, and learning how to prevent future injuries.

Regenerative therapy

This is the newest form of treatment when it comes to sports medicine, and the goal is to help the body to promote self healing, with the use of recent techniques like platelet rich plasma (PRP) therapy. 

Occupational therapy

This is a treatment option for people that have gone through a problem that affects their mobility like a stroke, a physical disability, or recovering from an operation. It is often confused with physical therapy, but it is more designed to allow people to resume normal functions in their everyday lives that aren’t just connected to injuries.

Basic methods to help with recovery like the RICE (rest, ice, compression, and elevation), using over the counter pain medications, and focusing on lifestyle changes and weight loss can also help to get you to heal faster and stay healthy. So if you need to heal up from an injury or other physical ailment, make an appointment with Dr. Daniels and his team at Southwest Orthopedic Associates today.