It’s often not until you’re sitting on the sidelines that you really appreciate how important your active lifestyle is to both your physical and mental well-being. In fact, faced with a sports injury, most patients are more concerned about getting back in the game than anything else.
As a sports medicine specialist and board-certified orthopedic surgeon, Gregg K. Satow, MD has extensive experience helping active patients get to the other side of sports injuries and we’re confident we can do the same for you.
The road to recovery after any sports injury is highly dependent on circumstances and severity. That said, if you’re dealing with an ankle injury and you’re undergoing ankle arthroscopy with us, there are some rules of thumb that we can share.
A return to sport (RTS) timeline is a different beast from a normal recovery timeline. Recovering so that you can get back to your normal activities — such as going to work and walking the dog — is much different than getting back onto the field, track, or court for athletic pursuits.
When you’re returning to sport after an injury, we want to make sure that you heal strongly and that your chances for re-injury decrease. Your patience is critical here because re-injury is often worse than the original damage, so we don’t want to push too fast or too hard.
When it comes to sports medicine procedures, arthroscopy is a true workhorse. Using scopes and specialized tools, we take a minimally invasive approach to accessing the damaged tissues in your ankle to diagnose and repair the problem.
In many cases, we turn to ankle arthroscopy to remedy chronic ankle instability, which develops in up to 70% of acute ankle sprains. Or, we might use the procedure to tackle other issues, such as arthritis, synovitis, or capsular thickening.
No matter the details of your ankle arthroscopy, you should count on at least a 12-month timeline for returning to your chosen sport at your previous level of play.
To give you a more detailed picture, we want to highlight a study that focuses specifically on this subject — return to sports after ankle arthroscopy. This study followed 40 patients and reported that:
One of the most interesting findings in this study is the role that motivation plays in the successful and timely return to sports. Researchers concluded that, “Both the rate of and the time to RTS were independently associated with greater preoperative motivation.”
There’s a lot that you can do to influence your own recovery timeline after ankle arthroscopy. Motivation and full participation in the recovery process — such as fully engaging in your physical therapy — can go a long way toward getting you off the bench and back into the game.
If you have more questions about your upcoming ankle arthroscopy journey and recovery timeline, please don’t hesitate to contact Gregg K. Satow, MD, online or by phone, to schedule an appointment at our Monterey, California, practice.
