What is sports medicine?
Sports medicine focuses on helping people achieve their best performances. A large part of this involves preventing and treating sports injuries.
Using the right techniques and avoiding damage to your bones, joints, muscles, and connective tissue helps prevent pain and the loss of valuable training and competing time. If you can avoid sports injuries, you’re also more likely to continue playing and being active for longer.
You don’t have to be an elite athlete to benefit from sports medicine. Dr. Alevizos can help anyone at any level, from high school football players to active seniors.
What injuries can sports medicine prevent and treat?
There are many ways to injure yourself playing sports or training. Collisions and falls might cause fractures, twisting awkwardly or overreaching can sprain ligaments and strain tendons, and repeating the same movements over many months and years can lead to overuse injuries like tendinitis.
Some of the conditions that Dr. Alevizos treats most often include:
- ACL tears
- MCL tears
- Achilles tendon injuries
- Sprained ankles
- Rotator cuff tears
- Dislocations
- Patellofemoral pain syndrome
- Meniscus tears
- Labral tears
- Hamstring strains
- Medial epicondylitis (tennis elbow)
- Lateral epicondylitis (golfer’s elbow)
These injuries often affect your joints, particularly the knees, which come under a great deal of strain in most sports.
What sports medicine treatments might I need?
The treatment you need for a sports injury varies according to the nature of the injury and its severity. You might also opt for different treatment choices depending on whether you’re a serious competitor who needs to regain full function, or a weekend warrior who’s involved in a far more casual way.
Treatments that Dr. Alevizos might use in your rehabilitation include:
- Physical therapy
- Ice and heat
- Strapping, bracing, or splinting
- Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections
- Steroid injections
Dr. Alevizos creates a sports medicine treatment plan that he personalizes to your condition and goals. He aims to encourage tissue repair and regeneration quickly, but completely, to make sure you can return to training in good time without risking further injury.
He also looks at your general health to see if you have any underlying medical issues that could affect your performance or make you more prone to injury. A hormone imbalance, for example, could make you gain weight and suffer from chronic fatigue. Dr. Alevizos can identify problems like these and treat them using hormone replacement therapy.
If you sustain a sports injury or want an assessment of your health to improve your athletic performance, call Alevizos Medical or book an appointment online today.
