Sports Injuries Among The Old

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 490
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There's something about the Boomers. More than any earlier generation, they have a burning desire to stay young or grow old disgracefully. As children during the fifties and young adults when the social revolution that was the sixties really took off, they have just refused to conform to expectations. Some would also have been in the hippie and later flower-power movements so experimented with different forms of recreation. Put all this together and you can expect them to be going noisily into the night. Indeed, go into any emergency room, and you are likely to find an impressive number of older people nursing sports-related injuries.

There's a federal agency to collect data about the use of healthcare resources, and it's detecting a real trend for the over 55s to sprain or strain muscles, ligaments or tendons. This is a quite serious problem because, the older the person, the longer it takes them to heal. So many more people are now reporting chronic pain and taking up resources for rehabilitation and therapy. The good news is that this drive to maintain fitness into the golden years will undoubtedly help keep people ...
... physically younger and prepare them for old age. When people give up exercise and allow their bodies to lose muscle tone, this is the first real step into old age. The first signs of this are an increasing lack of coordination and loss of balance. With regular sporting activity, people are maintaining competitiveness and motivation. Their bodies will stay healthier.

The bad news is that people forget they are getting older and, instead of stretching and warming up properly, they launch straight into a game of tennis or softball and, before you can say Jack Robinson, they are nursing an injury. This is encouraging a major research effort to find new ways of encouraging our bodies to heal faster. Some of the most interesting, like platelet-rich plasma therapy, are still going through testing and are not yet covered by health plans. But there are real signs of encouraging developments to promote new growth in old muscles, tendons and cartilage.

If you are injured, how should you deal with the problem? The first step is in the mind. You have to accept you are older now and this will take time to heal. Second, the scar tissue that forms around tears and strains can slow the healing process and, if it does not clear properly, can prevent muscles from regaining their strength and mobility. Indeed, once old muscles are injured, the risk of injury at the same site increases. So you need rehabilitation and physical therapy to rebuild strength and teach you how to move safely.

At this time, it's entirely possible there's real and continuing pain. You should consider using Tramadol to keep this under control while you begin the process of exercising to recover mobility. But never forget that, even though you may not feel the pain, you still have the injury. There's a real risk of aggravating the injury if you push too hard. The answer is to taper off the use of Tramadol as the exercise routines start to take effect. That way, you can listen to your body's responses and go at the right speed for a full recovery.