What begins as a minor ankle sprain or pulled muscle on the practice field can turn out to have lasting effects without proper treatment.
Ochsner Medical Center – Baton Rouge head of orthopedics Dr. Bruce Monaco said even small injuries can accumulate over time.
“Injuries tend to be cumulative,” Dr. Monaco said. “I will tell patients in middle age that the sins of their youth have come back to haunt them.”
Even after the body heals from an injury, it doesn’t forget the trauma it endured, Dr. Monaco said.
“While a mild injury may quiet down and go away, you may well have modified your activities to allow it to go away, so you’re deluding yourself into believing that it’s better,” he said. “Then, when you go out and attempt to use that body part in a more normal fashion, it’s likely to be reinjured.”
Even simple injuries that wouldn’t take an athlete out of the game can have long lasting effects, Dr. Monaco said.
“For example, you throw that one pitch at 16 years old and your shoulder hurts for a little bit, and 20 years later you discover you have chronic rotator cuff disease because of the abuse you put on it when you were pitching,” he said.
But it’s not only athletes who are at risk of long lasting injuries, Dr. Monaco said.
“It could be a whole variety of scenarios,” he said. “You may wrench your back a little bit at 25 years old digging in the garden, but at 55 years old you may discover that the back you wrenched now has some arthritis in it, and it’s going to be a chronic problem.”
All injuries, no matter how small, should receive proper treatment right away to prevent or minimize long lasting effects, Dr. Monaco said.
“You have to take the injury seriously,” he said. “Your body tends to tell you things, and we all tend to ignore what our bodies say, but you really need to be in tune to your physical sense and let your body tell you how you should react.”
To learn more about orthopedics at Ochsner, click here.
Sports Injuries and Arthritis
Articles From June 2011
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