How To Treat Stress Fractures Video

Stress fracture treatments and healing methods include rest, stretching and wearing certain equipment. Learn how to treat sports injuries in this video on health and rehab.

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Wear crutches and boot
Restore calf flexibility
Do non-weight bearing activities

About this Author

Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.

RUSS PAINE: Today, we're going to talk about stress fractures with runners, and particularly we're going to talk about tibial stress fractures. This is a very painful condition but if you don't treat it the right way, it could bother you and actually cause you to have to stop running altogether. So this is a picture here that depicts a tibial stress fracture. And again, this is very similar to shin splints. So shin splints again, you have pain down the medial border of your tibia. It's really hard and almost impossible to figure this out without what we call a bone scan. A bone scan measures your bone and shows if you have any increase circulation or increase cellular activity at the area where you have bony inflammation. So if you have a positive bone scan--and a lot of times this happens when people are increasing their mileage as they train for a marathon. All of a sudden they get this tremendous pain and it's a result of that repetitive loading of the bone. It just can't handle it. So the treatment for this is actually to put you in a boot and put you non-weight bearing on crutches for anywhere from 2 to 4 to 6 weeks depending on how your symptoms resolve. Once you come out of that boot and do the non-weight bearing condition, usually you return back to activity pretty quickly. So we have to restore calf flexibility and make sure that we restore strength that comes from disuse from the non-weight bearing condition. But if you don't recognize a stress fracture and you continue to weight bear on it, you'll never get well. But non-weight bearing and being very compliant with your non-weight bearing activity is very important in treating a stress fracture.

How to Treat Stress Fractures Video

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