The End Of Pain?

A stubborn injury is a runner’s WORST NIGHTMARE. Luckily, sports-medicine experts are developing NEW TECHNIQUES to provide relief – without surgery. Here’s a guide to five CUTTING-EDGE THERAPIES.

- Brad Stulberg

SPORTS MEDICINE has come a long way since the 1960s, when Runner’s World was first published. Back then, runners with a muscular or joint injury were prescribed rest, ice, compression, elevation (RICE) – and that was about it. X-rays detected fractures, which usually landed a runner in a hard cast with weeks of immobilisation. Today there are many more diagnostic and treatment options available. From bone scans to MRIs, from biomechanical video analysis to gait retraining, from muscle stimulation to kinesio tape, sports-medicine practitioners have more tools than ever at their disposal to heal runners and keep them healthy.

But that’s just the beginning. Researchers are always striving to develop advanced therapies that are more effective and that give athletes with persistent injuries a non-surgical option.

“The field is really at a fascinating juncture,” says Dr Joseph C McGinley, a sports-medicine physician and radiologist and clinical instructor in the department of radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in the US. “We are starting to treat conditions that once required surgery and significant downtime with minimally invasive therapies.”

While the development of cutting-edge treatments is exciting, the research on some of them is young, and the results thus far are mixed, says John Ball, a chiropractic sports physician. “This doesn’t mean some of these treatments can’t be effective, but they should be used as a last resort, for injuries that haven’t responded to traditional therapies.”