Chiropractic and Elastic Therapeutic Taping: Helping a Young Athlete Finish the Game

:dropcap_open:W:dropcap_close:e all employ a variety of techniques with our patients, and even with people we may not originally have thought of as patients. In almost 20 years as an educator and practicing DC, I have often been asked to share in unexpected areas. Kinesio Taping, or Elastic Therapeutic Taping, has been a valuable tool for me since 1999, and I now have the pleasure of helping to spread its use in my role as a Certified Kinesio Taping® Instructor (CKTI). 

 

Several years ago I was practicing in the Houston area.  My daughter attended a private school just north of Houston that had a nationally ranked basketball program. I was a pretty involved parent, and it doesn’t take long for the school to discover which parents have useful skills. I was happy to help whenever I could, to keep the school’s athletes in top form, but more importantly to help the young people get the most possible enjoyment from their high school years.

 

The head coach asked me to look at one of his best players who was having low back pain. The young man could only play half a game because his low back would tighten up and become painful by halftime. Even so, he was still scoring around 40 points a game, so it was natural for the coach to want him available for the entire game. And we all wanted the kid to feel better!

 

I adjusted him several times within a few days and applied tape to his low back to relax his muscles and relieve his low back pain. He had pretty classic lower lumber facet joint subluxation and sacroiliac inflammation. His range of motion was limited in flexion and extension. 

 

I treated him with side posture adjustments to the lower back and sacroiliac (SI) joints and then applied tape in a space correction to the lumbosacral area along with an I-O application to the lumbar paraspinal muscles. The space correction helped reduce the edema in the lumbosacral and SI region, while the I-O lumbar muscle application reduced muscle tension and edema in the lumbar paraspinal musculature. 

 

The next game he not only was able to play the  whole game without pain, but he scored 102 points. I’m not going to try and take credit for the young man’s basketball skills, but apparently my treatment helped him get to a new level!

 

There are many individual considerations in developing a treatment and therapeutic taping program for each patient’s needs. The following is a basic elastic therapeutic taping strategy for the lumbar fascia:  

 

With the patient standing in a neutral extension (with the closer arm raised) laterally flex the trunk to the opposite side. Apply the base of the tape “I” strip to the lateral 1/3 of the gluteal muscle bulk, approximately the posterior border of the gluteus medius.