Thinking Outside the Doctor's Office

Runners Find Relief from Alternative Treatments for Injuries

ART is not only a treatment for injuries, but also a tool to enhance performance. Distance runners are doing the same motion over and over. If there is the slightest biomechanical flaw—and there are very few runners, elite or otherwise, who have perfect biomechanics—the repetitive motion is going to create muscle imbalance. That imbalance is the start of the injury cycle. Removing the adhesions when they are small allows runners to optimize their stride, increasing their strength and speed. "ART allows the training volume and intensity to go way up," says Leahy.

Runyan turns to ART for injury treatment and prevention, as well as performance enhancement. "Since I began running the longer distance events, I have noticed many muscle imbalances [e.g., weak hamstrings and low back], and this has caused a chronic right hip problem. ART allows me to run, prevents the condition from becoming a full-blown injury, and corrects my running mechanics and efficiency."

The Point of Pain Relief

If ART is the new kid, acupuncture is the grandfather of alternative therapy. It has been around as long as there have been runners, emerging some 5,000 years ago in China, give or take a thousand years. Acupuncturists insert needles as thin as a piece of hair into specific points on the body. The ancient description of how the needles work goes like this: These needles regulate the body’s natural energy, called qi (pronounced "chee"). Injuries cause the flow of qi to be disrupted; acupuncture restores the flow to allow the body to heal itself. "Pain is seen as an imbalance of the body’s energy state and an obstruction of the internal energy flow," says Ines

Berger, M.D., an anesthesiologist with the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. "Acupuncture rebalances the body."

Berger blends conventional pain management techniques with the ancient Asian practice. She has treated runners with Achilles tendinitis, plantar fasciitis, hamstring pulls, and other injuries using acupuncture. "In a typical repetitive-motion injury, where the muscles get overused, micro calcifications develop in the muscles or tendons. They don’t slide smoothly over the joint lining, and the blood doesn’t flow," she explains. "When you relax the muscles, the blood flows, and the body can heal the calcifications. Acupuncture can relax the muscles so the body can heal," says Berger. She says that acupuncture also increases endorphins, those natural painkillers that runners crave.

Skepticism often makes acupuncture a treatment of last resort for runners. "If they’re skeptical and in my office, it’s because they’ve tried everything else," says Meredith Murphy, a licensed, certified acupuncturist in Bryn Mawr, PA. Murphy says that her defense against skepticism simply is successful treatment. A runner herself, Murphy can tell her own success story. After spraining her ankle, she went for one acupuncture treatment and was able to run, pain free, that same day.