Traditional Chinese Sports Medicine Acupuncture – decreases injury rehabilitation time

Sports Medicine Acupuncture is a broad and complex branch of health care that involves several disciplines. Essentially, sports medicine applies western medical and scientific knowledge to prevent, recognize, assess, manage and rehabilitate injuries related to sport, exercise or recreational activity. Sports medicine is targeted not only to the professional athlete but the person with an athletic or active lifestyle to enhance health, fitness and performance.

Sports Medicine Acupuncture is used by a variety of health care professionals and is practised in a number of venues with overlapping but distinct areas of expertise. This includes athletic trainers, acupuncturists, massage therapists, podiatrists, dietitians, psychologists, exercise physiologists, chiropractors, surgeons, physical therapists and several other specialities. Each health care discipline practising under the umbrella of sports medicine has the same goal of rehabilitating the injured athlete back to full participation and function.

The athlete young or old, professional or recreational are those individuals that use regular exercise to obtain health.Sports Medicine Acupuncture contains both Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Sports Medicine diagnostic techniques used to view the patient’s injury from each of these different perspectives. With both the professional and recreational athlete, the goal is to accurately assess the mechanism and severity of the patient’s musculoskeletal complaint. This is accomplished by using a combination of orthopaedic special tests, range of motion, manual muscle testing and palpation to identify the injured tissue.

These techniques used to assess local stagnation are joined with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) differential diagnosis, providing a paradigm of the athlete’s local injury and overall health (Qi, Blood, Yin, Yang, Shen). The objective of this combination, Sports Medicine Acupuncture is to address the athlete’s healing potential thereby strengthening the patient, and as a result, decreases injury rehabilitation time. Getting the athlete back to their desired activity, enhancing performance and preventing re-injury through treatment and education is the goal.