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Dr. Cannada shares what a woman can do after an ankle injury to strengthen her ligaments and muscles.
Dr. Cannada:
When someone sprains their ankle what people lose is the sense of connection between their ankle and their brain, their coordination, we call that proprioception. So it’s very important that a woman learns to gain balance or women or men, it doesn’t matter, for that issue they need to learn how they gain balance. So that involves progressing to activities on the injured foot only such as injured toe raises on the injured foot, trying to balance on the injured foot.
If you have ever sprained your ankle and you try and just stand and hold your legs out you would fail the drunk driving test but later on as you gain a sense of balance, so it’s a lot of toe raises, it’s a lot of balancing activity, balancing and squatting down.
We have special boards, the physical therapists do, that help with gaining your proprioception because once you sprain your ankle you don’t want to continue spraining your ankle. You don’t want to have stretched your ligament that much that you can’t protect yourself again.
About Dr. Cannada, M.D.:
Dr. Lisa K. Cannada, M.D., is an orthopaedic trauma surgeon with an extensive background in teaching and orthopaedic trauma surgery. She completed her medical school at University of Maryland in 1996 and entered her residency at University Hospitals of Cleveland. She came back to Maryland for her trauma fellowship at the RA Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Maryland.
She worked at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia for three years before accepting a position at the University of Texas-Southwestern. She truly loves her career as an orthopaedic trauma surgeon and is a strong advocate for Women in Orthopaedic Surgery.
Visit Doctor Cannada at Saint Louis University