How Your Sports Medicine Doctor Can Help You Elevate Your Game

 Maintaining your overall health is a complex process that requires eating a proper diet, controlling stress, taking preventive measures against disease and infection, and engaging in physical activity. Staying active is a really vital part of your health, as working your muscles helps to burn calories, enhance mood, control your weight, increase energy, and fight off chronic diseases.

If you’re looking to get more active or you’re already out on the field or in the game, knowing how to avoid injury is important — and that’s where sports medicine comes in. Let’s look at the benefits of these treatments by examining the basics of sports medicine, its different forms, and what it can help you with.

If you live in the Fort Worth, Texas, area and you’re trying to stay healthy or recover from injury, Dr. Joseph Daniels and his team at Southwest Orthopedic Associates can help. 

Understanding sports medicine

This is the broad term for many forms of biomechanical, nutritional, and physiological therapies and treatments to help keep you in healthy physical shape. Working together, we can help to perform examinations to gauge your health, assess conditions that affect physical activity, prescribe and dispense medications and treatments, and rehabilitate injuries if necessary.

Don’t let the term “sports medicine” fool you: This branch of medicine does help athletes and people in peak physical shape, but it’s designed to improve the lives of anyone who needs help getting into shape or recovering from injury.

Specialties of sports medicine 

Since the focus of sports medicine is your physical health, most of what we do targets the musculoskeletal system, which consists of your bones, ligaments, muscles, tendons, and connecting joints. The team of specialists responsible for administering the type of care include: 

• Physical therapists: this part of the team uses a variety of manual techniques to alleviate pain, help you relax, and loosen tightened muscles and tissue

• Musculoskeletal radiologists: a formal term for the people who perform the x-rays, ultrasounds, and other imaging to assess your condition

• Athletic trainers: there to help you tighten up your regimen or get your body back into shape 

• Orthopedic surgeons: if your injury requires surgical treatment, this part of the team performs a variety of procedures to repair or replace damaged joints

What we can help you with

With all of these specialists ready to help, we can manage a wide variety of issues, such as:

• Sprains and strains: damage to ligaments and muscles respectively, often in the form of stretching or tearing 

• Fractures: whether the bone is in your joint or not, if it gets cracked it can compromise its stability and lead to a break

• Overuse injuries: wearing down of the tissue in joints due to repetitive motions that hurt more and more over time

• Tendonitis: inflammation of the tendons in your joints, leading to pain, stiffness, and swelling

• Achilles tendon rupture or tear: a major tendon in your foot that if damaged can make walking very difficult

• Osteoarthritis: a common form of inflammation in your joint that over time wears down the cartilage and makes the joint stiffer, more painful, and harder to use

So whether you’re getting ready for a big sporting event, or trying to recover from an injury from playing, sports medicine can help get you back into shape. Make an appointment with Dr. Daniels and Southwest Orthopedic Associates today to get your body the help it needs.