Basketball is, allegedly, a non-contact sport. However, try telling that to any player who runs into a hard screen, gets knocked over in the lane, or takes an elbow to the head while going for a rebound.
With contact and collisions like that, injuries are bound to happen in basketball. However, so many of those that do occur are largely preventable.
“Ankle sprains are the most common injury in basketball,” said Powers Health orthopedic surgeon Dr. Michael Knesek, whose fellowship training was in sports medicine, “with ACL tears second among girls. An ACL tear may be far worse but neither injury is to be taken lightly and they are largely preventable.”
Ankle braces are the answer to ankle sprains. They won’t prevent them all but they come close and when a sprain does occur, it tends not to be as serious as it would have been without a brace.
The May 2021 issue of the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy provided a revision to its ankle sprain clinical practice guidelines that included a number of recommendations directly aimed at patients. The very first was prevention rather than treatment. According to the document, there is strong evidence that ankle braces will prevent first-time ankle sprains and thus should be worn by athletes in sports where ankle sprain is common, such as basketball, football, soccer and volleyball.
Depending on the study cited in the JOSPT document, ankle braces reduce the incidence of first-time ankle sprains by 40-69%.
The cost of a pair of lace-up ankle braces? Less than $100.
Consider a study published in the March 2018 issue of the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. In it, Dutch researchers looked at 132 patients five years after they had sprained an ankle. Nearly one in five (18.2%) were still having trouble all those years later. Furthermore, nearly one-third (30.3%) had re-sprained the ankle at least once.
For ACL injuries, an investment in prevention is also worthwhile. In this case, though, the solution is not paying for a relatively inexpensive wearable device but putting in some pre-practice effort instead.
There are braces out there that were originally designed to prevent ACL tears, but they are bulky, expensive, and do not work very well.
Alternatively, pre-practice warm-up routines that focus on jumping and landing techniques, improved balance, and hamstring strengthening have been found in multiple studies to significantly reduce the rate of ACL injuries.
These neuromuscular training programs, such as the FIFA 11+, reduce the incidence of ACL tears by 50-80%. They require 15-20 minutes, 2-3 times per week at the beginning of practice. Unfortunately, coaches routinely complain they can’t afford the time.
A European study published in November in the Journal of Athletic Training (JAT) refutes that “affordability” argument. It found that the average cost of an ACL tear was 6,341 Euro and a lateral ankle sprain was 732 Euro among amateur soccer and basketball players.
That would translate to $7419 and $856, respectively, if medical costs in the United States were equivalent to those across the Atlantic. According to Massachusetts General Hospital, the average price tag for an ACL reconstruction in this country is $10,000.
The authors of the JAT study concluded, “Importantly, 30% of the ACL injuries and 65% of the lateral ankle sprains were recurrent. More than 90% of the injured players do not implement neuromuscular training at all or implemented it in inadequate way. Therefore, there is an urgent need for policymakers to focus on injury prevention in amateur sports such as football (soccer) and basketball.”
To prevent that recurrent ankle sprain, physical therapy is often necessary. “There is more to it than just restoring motion and strength,” said physical therapist Amy Castillo, the director of therapy services at Community Hospital. “Balance training is every bit as necessary to decrease the likelihood of it happening again.”
Recurrent ACL injures tend to be career-ending. Consequently, preventing the first one is especially important to your health and your pocketbook. A study out of the University of Oregon published last year, also in JAT, looked at the potential cost savings from implementing ACL injury prevention programs for high school soccer teams nationwide. The authors found “a return on investment of $7.51 saved in ACL treatment costs prevented for every dollar spent on (implementation of) our full model. The total net monetary benefit was over $60 million when simulating (national implementation).”
That estimated savings was for just one year.
Comparing the costs of injury prevention measures available to basketball teams to the costs of ankle and knee injuries, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. Ignoring those measures, then, is madness.
However, when the basketball player in your house does get hurt, the professionals at Powers Health are available to treat the injury and to get you safely back on the floor as soon as possible.
John Doherty is the Vice President of Therapy Services and Sports Medicine. He is a licensed athletic trainer and physical therapist. Reach him at jdoherty@powershealth.org. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @JDohertyATCPT.
