How Does Acupuncture Treat Sports Injuries? Part 1
What is a sports injury?
Let’s start with the basics. What is a sports injury anyways? Sports injuries can look like a lot of different things depending on the type of sport you participate in. A climber might come in with a finger pulley injuries, elbow tendonitis, or a rotator cuff tear, while a snowboarder or skier might suffer from an ACL or MCL tear. They can be acute in nature (happen after a fall, collision or traumatic incidence) or chronic in nature (comes on in an insidious, a.k.a. slow, manner after repeated movements cumulating over days, weeks or months of overuse). Below are a list of examples of sports injuries I see:
Shoulder rotator cuff tears and strains
Knee ligament and meniscus injuries (common with sudden starting, stopping and direction changing)
Ankle or wrist sprains and strains
Vertebral disc injury in the neck or back
Strains and tears of any muscle or tendon (i.e. hamstring, Achilles tendon)
How can acupuncture help a sports injury?
The principle of Chinese Medicine is simple really. When things are out of balance, you coax the body back into balance with the opposing energy. For example, during the acute phase of an injury, there will be redness, heat, swelling, bruising (blood stagnation). In addition to acupuncture treating pain, the Chinese Medicine approach to an acute injury like this is to apply cooling topical herbs to extinguish the heat, and use acupuncture and/or herbs to promoting blood movement to help flush the area of stagnate fluids and blood (bruising) while simultaneously enriching the area with fresh blood and better mobilizing the immune response. While the typical approach of R.I.C.E. (rest, ice compression, elevation) can help reduce immediate inflammation, studies, like this 2021 study, have shown that applying ice to an injury can actually impede the phases of recovery thus increasing recovery time. The delayed recovery also applies to muscle soreness you might experience from workouts. In addition to the effects on the healing response, acupuncture can also effects on the local tissue through its influence on proprioception (perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body or a body part) and range of motion in a joint.
How can acupuncture increase proprioception and range of motion?
Acupuncture’s ability to nudge the body’s natural healing responses is one way in which acupuncture can help heal sports injuries. It also has a more local effect in the injured tissue as well as surrounding tissues that can help increase proprioception and range of motion. For example, acupuncture has an effect of cutaneous (skin) proprioceptors. As noted in this post from Matt Callison—founder of Sports Medicine Acupuncture and one of the leading experts in the sports acupuncture field—studies have shown that afferent (incoming) proprioceptive information from the skin assists in the perception of motion in a particular body part (Lephart, S. 1992, Reiman, B. 2002). Additionally, a study displayed that patients with anterior cruciate deficient knees and osteoarthritis relied more on the skin proprioceptors for the perception of joint motion than non-injured individuals.
Stay tuned for part two on sports injuries, acupuncture and how treating local trigger points or motor points (dry needling) can help restore function…