Sports Injury Treatment

Sports injuries are not a separate category of injury. They are the same shoulders and knees, injured in a particular way, in people with a specific thing they want to get back to. That last part is what changes the treatment.

What we treat

The bulk of it is shoulder and knee:

• Knee ligament injuries, including the ACL
• Meniscus tears, particularly acute tears in younger athletes where repair rather than trimming may be possible
• Shoulder dislocation and instability, common in contact sports
• Rotator cuff and labral injuries, common in overhead sports
• Tendon injuries including tennis and golfer’s elbow
• Cartilage injuries from impact or twisting

Diagnosis first, and usually without a scan

Most sports injuries are diagnosed by examination. What happened, what you felt, whether you could continue, how quickly it swelled, and what the joint does now will usually identify the problem before any imaging is involved.

Imaging is ordered when it would change what we do: when the examination is unclear, when a structural injury is suspected that would alter treatment, or when recovery is not proceeding as it should.

Surgery is not the default

A significant proportion of sports injuries do not need an operation, and are better served by a properly structured rehabilitation programme.

An ACL tear in someone who does not pivot for work or sport may not need reconstruction. A degenerative meniscal tear in an older recreational athlete usually does better with rehabilitation than with arthroscopy. Shoulder impingement almost always responds to work on how the shoulder blade moves.

Where surgery is genuinely the right answer, and for a young athlete with an unstable knee or a recurrently dislocating shoulder it often is, then delay costs something and we will say so.

Return to play is a set of criteria, not a date

This is where most re-injuries are made.

Recovery timelines get quoted as dates because dates are easy to communicate. Nine months after an ACL reconstruction is not, however, a green light. What matters is whether strength has returned relative to the uninjured side, whether control holds up under fatigue, whether movement patterns have normalised, and whether you actually trust the joint.

Athletes who return before meeting those criteria tear things again at markedly higher rates. Being told to wait when you feel ready is frustrating, and it is usually the right advice.

Return is also staged rather than binary: training without contact, then full training, then competition. Each step is a test of the one before.

Preventing the second injury

Having been injured once is a strong predictor of being injured again, and the reasons are usually addressable: strength that never fully came back, movement patterns that changed to protect the injury and then stayed changed, or a return that came too early.

Rehabilitation should continue past the point where the joint stops hurting. Stopping when symptoms resolve, which is when most people stop, leaves the underlying deficit in place.

Younger athletes

Growing athletes are not small adults. Growth plates are the weak link, so injuries that would tear a ligament in an adult can injure bone in a child, and some overuse injuries are specific to growth.

Sport specialisation and year-round single-sport training raise overuse injury risk, and that is worth a frank conversation with parents when it comes up.

Injured at work rather than at sport

The same injuries occur at work, and if yours did, the documentation requirements are different from the first visit onwards. See workers’ compensation.