Ankle Sprains and Ankle Injuries – Dr. Kara Crabill – N8 Family Chiropractic

Hello again, this is Dr. Kara Crabill from N8 Family Chiropractic, and today I’m here to talk to you about ankle sprains. So some facts about ankle sprains, ankle sprains account for 14% of all athletic injuries and 25% of ankle injuries are in running and jumping sports, and 50% of ankle injuries happen in basketball.

So how ankle sprains happen. The most common ankle sprain is what’s called a lateral ankle spring. That means your foot is pointed down and it turns in. So you might find this when walking on uneven surfaces, or if you’re playing in a basketball game or you’re jumping, you might land wrong. So it’s associated with landing from a jump or landing on other people’s feet, or it can also happen with just slowing down and changing a quick direction. That can cause a lot of your ankle injuries, okay?

So another reason why somebody can get an ankle injury is if they’ve had previous ankle injuries before, if they have low top shoes, narrow shoes, or just generalized laxity, the ankle’s not strong. So some various things that we can do to check this when you come into the office and we can check your prior history and see why you’re having the ankle injury or how you got the ankle injury. And then we also check the ability for you to bear weight. This is very important because this helps us set the degree of the ankle injury. So first degree could be, you might be running on the ankle. A second degree, you might only be able to walk on the ankle, or third degree, you’re non-weightbearing, you can’t really walk on it or run, that you need extra support. We also assess for the amount of swelling that happens with the ankle injury and the severity of the injury, okay. Also, if there’s an audible pop, that can be significant with a tear, but that’s upon a further evaluation.

Now, when evaluating the ankle, the doctor will inspect and feel the swelling of the area and check for tenderness, pinpoint tenderness in the ankle. A tidbit here, pain is not always proportional to the degree of injury. So you could have severe laxity, but low pain. It just depends on how your body is processing it.

After the doctor evaluates the area, then they’ll further run orthopedic tests and see if they need to send out for x-rays or if they can do conservative treatment. Now, some conservative treatment that we would do is ice. That is going to be the best thing you can do because that’s going to help reduce the pain, and it’s going to help reduce the swelling in the area. Also compress, so if you compress the ankle, that’s going to help with the swelling and it’s going to help push out the swelling and keep the swelling from getting worse. Also elevating, you want to elevate the ankle and make sure that the swelling is getting pushed out of the body and it’s not getting worse. So you can remember this acronym as RICE, rest, ice, compress, elevate.

So if you hurt your ankle and you don’t know what to do, come and see one of us N8 doctors, we’ll definitely be able to help you out. And I hope you have a fantastic day and I can’t wait to talk to you next time. Thank you.