SportsGeezer

Ankle Sprains: What To Do Once It's Done

High on the list of events that Geezer is not eager to experience, or even imagine, is spraining an ankle. He remembers all too well the moment of realization that the entire weight of his body has just forced the bones of his ankle into a position they were never intended to assume. There is the strange clicking sound that bones are not supposed to make, and the rush of nausea informing us that we will spend the next few days doing something that doesn't involve walking. Sprained ankles hurt. And they can do permanent damage.
What to do once it's done? Geezer recommends sending the wife out for nice Rioja and renting a good movie--The Savages, perhaps. The New York Times has some other ideas, (forget about taping). Read the Times' suggestions for getting back in the game in the wake of a sprain.

Another Gender Difference: Sports Injuries

While Geezer is constructing his proof that male athletes injure themselves better than women athletes, readers can see what the more reliable Judy Foreman says about the sports injuries that women seem drawn to: tears in the ACL, plantar fasciitis, compartment syndrome, shin splints in runners, and kneecap pain.  Foreman, the premier fitness writer for the Boston Globe, tells us that women's knees are more vulnerable than men's because the angle between the hip and the knee - is greater in women than in men. While wide hips are good for childbearing, Foreman writes, they mean there is more stress on the knee in moves like landing from a jump and twisting. This torque can shred the ACL, a ligament that helps stabilize the knee,and is a major reason why female athletes have four times more ACL tears than men do. Read more about sports injuries that women just can't resist in the Boston Globe.

Does Core Stability Reduce Back Pain?

Does pumping up core strength help to reduce back pain? The short answer, as revealed in this piece in the L.A. Times, is no one really knows.  The newspaper turns for help to Dr. Christopher Standaert, a clinical associate professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, who describes core stability training as the standard of care for back pain. "But,"he adds, "There's never even been a uniform agreement on the definition." The Times reports that among those who think that core training works, there are two schools of thought on exactly how it works. Some experts think that local muscles such as the multifidi and the transverse abdominis are critically important. Others think it's more about training movement patterns and broader motions and coordination of multiple muscles through your trunk to help your spine move more effectively.
Standaert tells the paper that whether one is talking about local or global core stabilization, the rush to embrace core training has gotten ahead of the science. "People need to know that the scientific clinical foundation, the research, doesn't match the extent of emphasis that trainers and therapists and all sorts of people put on it."
Read more in the Los Angeles Times.

Yes, You Humans Can Smell Danger Too

Good news for human readers: Even you can learn to smell danger. The BBC reports on research at Northwestern University that exposed 12 volunteers to two "grassy smells." Initially, none of the volunteers could tell the difference between the two odors. Then some were given a clue, in the form of a mild electric shock, administered while they were smelling one of the odors. From that moment on, the shocked volunteers had no trouble identifying the odor that had been associated with pain. Geezer is still pondering how this information can be put to good use.
Read more about the sweet smell of danger at the BBC.

Pricey Placebos Work Better Than Cheap Placebos

Why pay more? Because, as a recent study of placebos done at MIT found, the more you pay for pain relief, the better you feel. The Los Angeles Times reports on the study, summarized in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and which asked 82 volunteers to rate the intensity of electric shocks administered to their wrists before and after they received a dummy pain pill. Half of the study participants were told that the drug had a regular price of $2.50 a pill. The remaining subjects were told that the new medication had been discounted to 10 cents a pill. The bottom line? Researchers found that that you get what you pay for: 85 percent of subjects who received regular-priced pills reported feeling less pain after taking the dummy medication, compared with 61 percent of those who received the supposedly discounted pills.
Read more in the L.A. Times.

How to Relieve a Side-stitch

A gentle reader of the L.A. Times asks the paper's fitness-answer-man what to do about a side-stitch. Sometimes, the reader says, the stitch that comes on when he runs goes away of its own volition. Other times, he's not so lucky.
Answer-man Jay Blahnik has some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that no one really knows what causes a side-stitch, so no one really knows how to make the pain go away. The good news is that there are a half-dozen things that sometimes work. Over to you:
* Take a deep breath and then slowly exhale through pursed lips.
* Contract the abdominals while flexing the body toward the area of pain.
* Mix up your breathing pattern and stride pattern.
* Slow down and reduce your exercise intensity until the pain subsides.
* Jog in place and take a few moments to bend, twist and stretch the torso.
* You can also try extending your warmup period and taking more time to work up to your steady walking or running speed. This can be especially important in colder weather, when side-stitches may occur more frequently.
* Finally, Blahnik suggests that when you drink water before, during and after exercise, you try sipping your water rather than taking big gulps at less frequent intervals.
Read more from Jay Blahnik in the L.A. Times.

Gina Kolata on the Mystery of the Common Cramp

Geeky athletes who do the numbers know that cramps afflict 39 percent of marathon runners, 79 percent of triathletes, and 60 percent of cyclists at one time or another. What they don't know is why. Cramps are, as Gina Kolata writes in this New York Times piece, a medical mystery. The Times reports that cramps are commonly attributed to one of three factors: dehydration, electrolytic deficiency, and, more likely, an imbalance between nerve signals that excite a muscle and those that inhibit its contractions. Such an imbalance is more likely to occur when a muscle is growing fatigued. Geezer, who barely passed high school biology, goes with door number three.
Read more about what may cause cramps, but probably doesn't, in the New York Times.

Exercise Eases Arthritis

Want to know why it's a bad idea to let arthritis pain keep you from exercising? Because a recent study conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that exercise may actually ease the pain of arthritis. The Washington Post reports on the research, which followed 346 people with self-reported arthritis. Some were assigned to a group that followed the Arthritis Foundation Exercise Program, consisting of basic and advanced exercise classes twice a week for an hour a week for eight weeks. Others were put in a control group that did not take part in the exercise program. After eight weeks, people in the exercise group showed significant improvements in pain, fatigue and managing arthritis. The pain and fatigue improvements were still evident six months after completing the exercise program.
Read more in the Washington Post.

The Frozen Shoulder Mystery and What to Do About It

The strangest thing about frozen shoulder is that no one knows what brings it on. A woman--70 percent of the afflicted are middle-aged women-- wakes up one morning and whammo, she cannot move her shoulder. It's frozen, hence the name: frozen shoulder. What to do? The Boston Globe offers this advice: don't wait; get to a doctor pronto and tell him or her that you are suffering from adhesive capsulitis. The Globe claims that if treated soon enough, frozen shoulder can be melted with a simple shot of cortisone, while those who wait too long, hoping the condition will heal itself, can spend a year in therapy. Your choice. Read more about adhesive capsulitis in the Boston Globe.

Insoles and Back Pain: No Relief

Can wearing insoles help relieve back pain? Not according to the Boston Globe, which cites a recent review of six studies by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization that evaluates medical research. The Globe reports that researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem examined three prevention studies involving 2,061 participants and three other studies of both prevention and treatment involving 256 participants. The team concluded that "there is strong evidence that the use of insoles does not prevent back pain," and that "there is limited evidence that insoles alleviate back pain or adversely shift the pain to the lower extremities."
People looking for something that does prevent back pain, says Dr. Carol Hartigan, a rehabilitation specialist at the Spine Center at New England Baptist Hospital, should try exercise. Read more in the Boston Globe.