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What Should you Do After Breaking Your Leg?

Posted by AlaMed Injury Clinics | Feb 03, 2021 | 0 Comments

Imagine this. You are playing your favorite sport, right about to get a point for your team, when suddenly you slip. Your body goes one way, your foot another way and before you know it, snap! You have broken your leg. Upon breaking a limb, the most immediate course of action is to immobilize the affected limb. Broken bones are very painful so this should not be a hard undertaking to remember.

More than likely, the broken leg is not going to be easily moved, and a trained physician should be the one to set the broken bone to ensure it heals properly. Once you have found yourself with a broken leg, the following steps need to be taken:

Diagnosis Of The Injury

Upon determining that you cannot walk, or maybe cannot even sit up if the pain is too much, medical professionals must be called. Whether one's friends call the ambulance, or a coach calls out the school or team's sports medical professional, action must be taken immediately to seek treatment. Pain treatment can be administered in most cases, though keeping this pain management in the realm of Tylenol or another over-the-counter painkiller is advisable.

Treatment Begins

Upon getting to the proper hospital, doctor's office, or sports recovery clinic, treatment will begin. The treatment for a broken leg starts with taking an X-ray of the leg to ensure that the limb is in fact broken. This X-ray process will also help to highlight where the break is, and how severe the injury is. Once the break is determined and verified by this X-ray, then the treatment begins. This treatment includes immobilizing the leg in a cast.

This is done to ensure that the bones do not move or shift at all during the long process that it takes for a body to heal a broken bone. This process is time-consuming and there is nothing to be done during the healing process except to wait. Casts are heavy and they cannot get wet, so for the next few weeks, recipients of broken legs will have to get used to using crutches and wrapping up their casts during bathing to protect the plaster.

On the Way To Recovery

Recovering from a broken leg is a game of waiting, as has been referenced. Yet the respective training required for a particular sport need not be abandoned altogether during the healing process. Rather, training can continue even though the broken leg will not be able to improve its own strength or flexibility. On the other hand, once the cast is removed the recovery process will really have to start for the broken limb.

Getting Back To School Or Work

Once the cast is removed – usually around 6 weeks from the time of the case being set depending on the severity of the break – recovery can begin. The recovery process is what allows individuals to return to their pre-injury lives. This often requires physical therapy to ensure that the healed bone and weakened muscles can catch up to the other leg that was not injured. The broken limb will have had no muscle activation during the entire time that the cast has been on.

This means that the leg muscles will be very weak and will need to have time and exercise focus to regain their strength and capacities. Ensuring that you get back to school or work in a timely manner incorporates some degree of physical therapy is the best way to ensure that the healed leg can catch up to the uninjured leg. Thus physical therapy and progressively using the healed limb with more and more frequency are the best combination of activities to get back to school or work quickly.

Contact AlaMed For Your Broken Leg Treatment

Working through a broken leg is not an easy undertaking as it requires patience and fortitude. Yet most people will undergo broken legs at some point in their lives. Whether from sports injuries as in this example, or from car accidents of standard slips and falls, broken limbs are an unavoidable part of life for most human beings.

Particularly as humans age, our bones become more brittle, and this can make breaks far more likely. Understanding what to do in the case of a broken leg is simply a smart thing to know because either you or someone who you know well will probably fall victim to this injury at some point in your life.

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