Casting for an ankle sprain?
February 13, 2009 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
Several years ago, I stepped half on the sidewalk, half off. What resulted was a very hard fall and a very, very painful ankle. I had hurt this ankle before. When I was one day before my due date with my first child, I fell and sprained my ankle so badly, everyone thought it was broken (Imagine a 9-month pregnant woman on crutches!). This fall felt even worse.
Off to the hospital for an x-ray and the doctor in emergency said she thought it was broken, but she wasn’t sure, so she sent me home with just an ace bandage and told me to come back the next day. So, I did. The radiologist looked at my x-ray and said, yup, broken and they casted my foot with a heavy walking cast.
About a week later, I was out of town and my ankle was getting more and more painful. I could feel it pushing against the cast and I couldn’t sleep because it hurt so much. I went to a local hospital there where my foot was x-rayed and the emergency room doctor rushed to rip off my cast as quickly as he could. My ankle was never broken. It was a very bad sprain.
To this day, I blame my tendency to twist that ankle easily to the damage the cast did to my ankle. That cast was *heavy* and it definitely wasn’t helping my foot, considering how much pain I was in and how it was worsening.
Anyway, that whole story was to tell you that I have to admit, I was quite surprised to read of this study that recommends casting for severe ankle sprains. The U.K. study, published in this week’s issue of the Lancet, found that patients who had severe ankle sprains healed faster if they had a below the knee cast, for 10 days, than if they had it traditionally wrapped.
The Bledsoe Boot didn’t fare quite as well in the study. While there was a 9% improvement among patients with below knee casts (over wrapping) and an 8% improvement with an Aircast, the Bledsoe Boot only showed a 6% improvement, which the researchers didn’t consider to be significant.
What I’d like to know is if the cast was a walking cast or a regular one. I know that walking casts are much heavier than traditional ones – that I learned from experience!
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Images: iStock
Tags: pain blog, sprained ankle, severe ankle sprain, casts, bledsoe boot, aircast
