We do a lot of athletic rehab, particularly ACL rehab, this is what we think is an ideal pathway when you decide what you’re going to do and what happens after you hurt yourself. The standard way that we hear a lot of is you hurt yourself and then you wait and then you end up having surgery and then you do a bit of rehab afterwards. This has been good for a while, but what we know about ACL injuries is they’re more likely to happen again once you’ve done them and one of the biggest factors as to whether you have a good outcome or not is the quality of your rehab.
What we suggest is a better model, and the model that we run in conjunction with some of the best surgeons in Newcastle is that when you injure yourself you start with us straight away, you try and regain your range of motion, your quadricep strength in particular. You then get to a point where you’ve see an orthopedic specialist and you decide based on your injury, your circumstances and your goals, whether you opt for surgery or not. A lot of people don’t have the choice they need surgery, but a lot of people can get away with doing what they want to do without it and more and more people are finding that they can do that. No matter what decision you make, afterwards you do a huge amount of rehab.
The rehab that you need to do is of a very, very high level even if what you do normally, isn’t that hard. Pre and post surgery rehab are the biggest determining factors of what happens for you down the track, where whether you get back to what you want to get back to, whether it’s sport or life or whatever it is, the single greatest thing that you can do is invest as much time as possible into these two areas, that never guarantees anything, but it decreases your risk as much as possible. We tell people if you’re gonna do it once you may as well do it well and try and never do it again.
Hopefully if you’ve injured your ACL and you are going through the process, hopefully yours looks like this. If you’re just waiting around doing nothing to see what’s going to happen, do something about it. https://youtu.be/Sklo2C-vYQM
