Dr. Merrick Wetzler - What is Sports Medicine?
Dr. Merrick Wetzler is a Sports Medicine Family Practitioner in Voorhees, NJ. As a Sports Medicine Family Practitioner, Dr. Wetzler is trained to assess, diagnose, prevent, and treat sports injuries in patients of all ages, and refer those patients to further services if needed. Sports Medicine Family Practitioners must... more
5 Things You May Not Know About Sports Medicine
Despite how it sounds, sports medicine isn’t just for the professional or casual athlete. Traumatic injuries can happen anywhere and not just on the sports field. Sports medicine focuses on acute and chronic injuries to a patient’s major joints. Major joints include the shoulder, elbow, hip, knee, and ankle.
1) Early Intervention Is Important
Whether you suffer from a new injury, or something chronically, knowing your condition as early as possible gives you the best chance for a quick & thorough recovery. This also gives sports medicine doctors the best opportunity to treat you effectively.
2) New Treatments Can Speed Up Healing
Unless you’re a professional athlete, most injury cases can be treated without surgery using treatments meant to help you heal with immobilization techniques & rehabilitation.
3) Joint Surgery Has Come A Long Way
Most surgical patients will benefit from arthroscopy which is a minimally invasive approach in which pencil-thin instruments and a tiny camera are inserted through small incisions. With arthroscopy, patients typically return to work within a week which is more than twice as fast as patient’s enduring open surgery.
4) Are You Feeling Weak In The Knees?
The most common sports-related injury involves our largest and most complex joint. Though the knee is designed to support seven times the body’s weight, it’s highly vulnerable to injury. The rotational forces involved in pivoting subject the surrounding ligaments to alot of stress & sometimes they fail.
5) Sometimes, Major Surgery Is Still The Best Option
Joint replacement may be the only option to restore full function to a patient. That includes patients that tear ligaments, layers of cartilage that support and stabilize the knee, or patients that have cartilage starting to break down due to aging.
