Ankle sprains are tears of ligaments around the ankle joint. These small tears cause pain and discomfort. Let’s learn more about the causes, symptoms, and best treatments here:
What are the main causes?
The most common causes are athletic activities, like running or hiking, slipping, prolonged repetitive movements, sports, exercising on uneven surface, and even another person stepping or landing on your ankle!
Depending on the cause and other factors, the severity of tears in these ligaments can lead to different severities of pain. For this reason, various other symptoms around the ankle and discomfort can lead to different grades of ankle sprains.
Grades of Ankle Sprains
Ankle sprains can come in multiple grades and levels of severity. Consequently, levels get consistently worse with the amount of tearing done to the tendons surrounding the ankle. A common way to diagnose the level of ankle sprain is the amount of swelling and bruising done to the ankle, with little swelling on a level I, and increasingly more on levels, II and III.
Symptoms of Ankle Sprains
There are many symptoms to sprained ankles. These can range from overall pain in the foot and surrounding the sprained ankle, swelling, bruising, tenderness to touch, restricted range of motion, instability of the ankle, pain when using the ankle.
How to Treat Ankle Sprains
At Physical Therapy of Milwaukee, we can help you recover, and even prevent, sprained ankles thanks to our wide range of treatments. These treatments include: dry needling, manual therapy, kinesiotaping, cupping, graston, electrical stimulation, therapeutic exercise & much more! Common self care measures include icing and keeping it stable and elevated while healing, follow the R.I.C.E. (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevate) recovery technique.
If you want to learn more about this, be sure to read this article from Harvard Medical School.