Few states in the USA can boast of a sports history as proud as Texas. Texas teams and athletes rank near the top of the nation in their respective sports at all levels of competition. Even professional teams from other regions find a disproportionate number of their athletes hail from Texas itself or from a Texas college. Even the small schools in Texas can produce athletes who absolutely dominate their sport, such as Texas Tech’s own Wes Welker. That’s not even accounting for the long storied history of the Dallas Cowboys, or the recent surge of the Houston Texans. Outside of football, this trend continues with the Dallas Mavericks, the Texas Rangers, and the Dallas Stars.
Professional and college sports teams in Texas have their own sports medicine and training staffers to help them deal with injuries and rehab for their players. To an amateur athlete in Texas, sports medicine can be a bit of a mystery.
The truth about sports is that even though they can be great for your body, injuries are practically a given. This is true even with non-obvious sports. Football and wrestling stand out as obvious sports for injury, but they are far from the only way someone can incur the need for Texas sports medicine. Golfers and tennis players suffer repetitive motion strain that can cause very real pain, and recreational runners can injure themselves on rough ground. Texas sports medicine is as integral a part of sports as competition itself.
This mystery is compounded by the human tendency to play doctor and assume you know more about medicine than you do. It’s hard for a high school student or parent to know the difference between an ankle sprain and a high ankle sprain. Nor do many know the effects either injury could have on an athlete’s career in sports. The results of mistreatment by a well-intentioned but uninformed amateur can be disastrous, though.
Athletes have a temptation to tough it out and walk it off. And while this temptation and drive can help them play through pain, it can cause them to miss the important medical treatment they need. This can even be made worse if the athlete has the trademark Texas toughness. Even the toughest athletes will sometimes need Texas sports medicine care to continue in their sport of choice.
Orthopedics and Texas sports medicine can even help non-athletes deal with repetitive strain injuries or spinal damage. Rehab can help someone with a torn ACL while going through a walk just as much as it can help the running back who took a tackle at the wrong angle.
