Sports Injury Care

Sports injury care addresses the particular demands athletic activity places on the body. Dr. Sami Makhoul has worked with professional athletes throughout his career, and that experience shapes how our practice approaches every active patient, from competitive players to weekend runners and high school teams here in Dearborn.

Athletes present differently from the general population. The injuries tend to be either acute events with a clear moment of onset, or overuse problems that build gradually as a repeated movement accumulates load in one place. Both need to be understood in the context of the sport, because the same shoulder pain means something quite different in a swimmer than in a golfer.

Our approach begins by identifying not just the injured structure but why it was the structure that failed. An injury often reflects a limitation elsewhere: a stiff mid-back that forced the shoulder to overwork, a weak hip that let the knee collapse inward under load. Treating the painful site without correcting that upstream cause tends to produce a recurrence as soon as training resumes.

Treatment typically combines adjustments to restore joint movement, myofascial release to free the compensating tissue, and shockwave therapy where a tendon problem has stalled. Therapeutic exercises then rebuild the specific capacity that was missing, and neuromuscular reeducation restores the movement pattern that broke down in the first place.

Return-to-play decisions are made honestly. Returning too early is the most common reason a resolved injury becomes a chronic one, and we would rather have a difficult conversation about timing than see a patient back with the same problem in six weeks. Where an injury needs imaging or a surgical opinion, we say so and refer.

Whether you are managing an injury, working through a nagging problem that will not settle, or simply want to move better, contact our office to arrange an appointment.