Understanding ACL Injuries and Preventive Measures: Insights from "Ask the Chiropractor

Prevention is key! Join us on a special episode where Coach Mason and I tackle non-contact ACL injuries and the best preventive measures. Don't miss this!  JOIN US AUGUST 21 at 6:00pm or 6:30pm https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26646514/  #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. And as you can see today, Ask the Chiropractor format is a little different than it typically is. If you're watching us, if you're listening to us, it's going to sound the same. But I'm happy to introduce a guest today because we have a really cool thing that I read a research paper on something from PubMed that was really cool. I thought it was pretty cool. A little bit of chiropractic, a little bit of strength conditioning. And it turns out one of my good friends had already read the same research paper and he was already one step ahead of me. So I want to introduce you to coach Mason. Coach Mason, will you tell us who you are and how we can find you? Hey, how we doing? I'm Coach Mason. I'm an athletic trainer over at Movement Fitness. I specialize in return to sport protocols, primarily with the ACL and the female athletes. So that's what we do over here at Movement and really returning athletes to sport safely and strongly in the best way possible is our main goal. I, we get the joy of working together with many people. I have people here that I think needs Coach Mason's help. And I think Coach Mason gets some people that think needs my help. And we get together once a week and we discuss everybody. So we have a really good relationship. And it's been really fun to watch people get well. But with Coach Mason talking about these ACL checks that he does. And I'm going to tell you the name of the research paper. And I'll put a link to that paper wherever you're listening or watching this. But it's from the. American Journal of Sports Medicine, 2016, February. This is the EPUB edition, 2015, December 8th, of the Hip and Muscle Strength Predicts Non Contact Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury in Male and Female Athletes Perspective Study. And the lead author, I'm just going to spell his name because I'm not going to be able to say it. It's K H A Y A M E R T B A S H I. And this is a PubMed article and that's my gold standard for research. Coach Mason, why don't you tell us a little bit about what this article is about. That title didn't give it all away, but maybe you can tell us a little bit what, how this came into your world. yes, definitely. Non contact ACLs the mechanism of those is our 75 percent of ACL tears. We believe that the hip and the knee, or the hip control can really be, those 75 percent of those injuries can be avoided if we have proper hip mechanics, proper loading mechanisms, and A lot of those things can be teached, and then also those improper mechanisms, they can be coached out of people. It's an amazing article, just to reinforce the idea that many of these ACL injuries, especially in the female population, they can be avoided, and they can be prevented, and at least a percentage of those can be reduced significantly. If people just get into some of these strength programs, And really be consistent with them. So I understand there's a, the article talks about a couple muscle tests and different exams you can do on people to see whether or not this might be something they should be worried about. And they can also test to show if they're clear, to show they maybe don't need to worry too much about it. Can you talk to us a little bit have you been able to do these tests on students and be able to find fun stuff? Yes, so I use a lot of these tests in my return to sport protocol that I have with my athletes who have torn their ACL and I'm working with them getting them back to playing their sport. So I'm using these tests to get them back, but I'm also using these tests as a predictor. So we have many athletes who have not torn their ACL and they're not Knock on wood, hopefully they're not going to, because we've used these tests, we've found, hey, we have a weakness, we have a weak link in the chain, and now we're going to address that. And we have ways that we can continue to work on and strengthen all of the things around so that next time we come in, next time we do that test they pass it instead of have a weak link. Maybe not the best result. My daughter last year was a sophomore in high school and I know there's one of their soccer players on her team blew her ACL, had to have surgery, missed the whole season. And I always think how much that would not be fun when you're 15 years old, but I also think how much that wouldn't be fun when you're 60 years old, having a surgery when you're 15 years old. Which, of course, When you're 15, you're invincible, right? So who cares? But I think the way as I'm getting older, approaching 50, I understand more of these things come back to haunt you. So I think that's a great service. So if you're a young athlete and you wanted to be careful of this, you could find somebody who understands this article like yourself and come in and get a quick screen. That way, if you're going to be vulnerable or whether or not it's predictor that this could happen, correct? Definitely. And I think how you talked about feeling that at 60 with an ACL tear, there's almost a promise of having arthritis later in your life. So that's going to affect you and that's going to be a big cost later down the stage, but then talking to this age range, we're talking to 15 to 18 year old age range or 14, really? The cost of that, you're losing about a year of your athletic career. Not only the physical cost of losing that year of playing, because a lot of our careers only go past up to high school, but the mental cost of that. That takes quite the toll, and I get to see that firsthand, unfortunately. All the time. And that's a big piece of the return to sport and big piece of getting people back and really understanding the mental impact that an ACL tear has. One, socially, mentally, and physically, and there is a financial cost as well. Yeah, I saw her go to homecoming, I think it was, maybe on crutches. I don't think that's the way she envisioned her dress looking as a dad with four daughters. And do you find this more common with boys or girls or is it does it not that make a difference? Females way more common. One in five females in that age range, especially in the soccer population, they're going to tear their ACL. So in the local club team here in that age, right there on that team there was 20 percent of the girls on the team had torn their ACL. At some point or we're out for the season. So if you go to a game, if you go to a soccer game, a basketball game, and you just look on the sidelines at a female event, you're going to see someone with an ACL brace or someone with the ACL scar on their knee. Men and boys going through that. Fortunately for them, they're not quite as at risk because of many other factors that do play a role in it. So females definitely are more at risk just from the start. And just to reiterate, we're talking about not getting tackled at a football game. We're talking about just running, a non contact drill. You're just doing your warm ups, you're doing your running on the field, and boom, now you're down and your season's over. Exactly. It's the she was, no one even touched her. That's the thing that you hear. She, no one was even around her and she just went down. And everyone's I didn't even know what happened. And that is unfortunately what you hear the majority of the time. And unfortunately when you hear that no one was around her as a non contact and they went down and their knee buckled, you know what's going on. I know that you've been doing a lot of screenings at your place and trying to get in front of different teams and trying to help them out before it happens. In chiropractic, we, we just preach prevention. And it sounds like that's exactly what you're trying to do. And I know you're going to be our guest over here on the 21st Wednesday night. You're going to come over here and you're going to screen some of the students here. If you're in the Rockford area and you're listening to my podcast, and you want to come over to my office and meet Coach Mason, he'll be happy to check you out that day. We have a sign up sheet going. Wherever you're listening or watching this, go ahead and contact us. And I'll have links to Movement Fitness where you can find Coach Mason, too, so you can reach out to him, too. I'm pretty sure that he's willing to come to Teams, correct, and meet with the coaching staff and the athletic training staff there and help them do this, too. Definitely. I'd love to. The education is going to be the main step to prevention for all of these athletes. And education is going to be the biggest piece of one, realizing who is at risk and realizing if you're the one that's at risk or if it's your daughter or. As a chiropractor, I know that I've never met anybody with bad knees and a good back. Those two things do not go hand in hand. So I know when you're limping on the knee or you have hip rotation, there's a lot of involvement in that. And again, a lot of times when I x ray somebody, I'll tell them, Boy, this vertebrae looks really bad. Did you have an injury there? And they'll say, No. But then I'll find out when they were 15, they did have a knee injury. And so that got injured then, but we don't know. You don't feel it when you're 15. You feel it when you get a little bit older. So again, this is all about prevention. This is where Coach Mason and I a lot of times work together. Because he'll have somebody that gets plateau or he'll see an imbalance in them, then I'm able to give them a few adjustments. And then they go right back over to Coach Mason and he's able to finish his, be able to help them better with his job after we clear him out. So it's really been a fun relationship working together watching these young athletes do well. And some of the older athletes too we've worked together with, coach Mason, we're getting near the end of the podcast here. I just want to ask you, is there anything you'd like to add or get the final word here? I'll go ahead and pass the mic back to you. Yeah, on the, just the topic of ACLs and unfortunately if you do. Experience in ACL tear and know someone who has just making sure that they're not going back before that nine month mark. I think the more that we can preach that is very important. People need to know that just because maybe your physician has cleared you at the six month mark, because that's generally when that will happen. But there's still some work to do and there's still some imbalances if you notice that your daughter or someone is running a little bit different after or if they have one leg who's a little bit bigger or smaller than the other, then there's something that needs to be addressed. And if they feel like there's something wrong, then you need to reach out for exterior help and trying to get that addressed and get that taken care of. A lot of times when I go into Coach Mason's room, he's reading research papers like myself. That's why I work with him. I always try to learn, always trying to get better and, the title of this podcast is if you have a question about chiropractic, ask a chiropractor and we talk a little bit about knees today, but I'm going to do what I tell you to do ask the expert. So today I brought in my expert to guide a little bit more deep into this. So I just want to thank everybody for listening and watching. Again, there'll be links below to the research paper and links below to how to get ahold of coach Mason. And if you're living in the Rockford area and you want to get your ACL check, there'll be, there's obviously links to my office, how to contact us and or contact movement fitness either way. And if you're a coach listening to this and you want to get coach Mason out on your sidelines to take a look at your players and make sure you look at a better coach because you have your best players on the field all year. You only get ahold of him and he'll work with you on that too. So on that note, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Coach Mason, thank you so much for joining us. And I look forward to having you over here in a couple days a little less than two weeks now to take a look at everybody. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate your time. Dr. Alright, we'll talk to everyone later. Bye bye.