Treatment of Grade 1 Hamstring Injury with Glucopuncture: A Clinical Case

Abstract

Hamstring strain injuries are common among athletes and often require intensive rehabilitation to prepare athletes for a timely return to sport performance. Return to sport is typically achieved within weeks of the hamstring injury. But subsequent athlete performance may be impaired. Both rehabilitation and preventive measures are crucial but not standardized yet. On top of the standard rehabilitation program, it would be interesting to add safe treatment modalities which could speed up recovery from such an injury. In this article we present a young athlete with a large grade 1 hamstring injury which was treated with regional sugar water injections into the muscular lesion. Although they can be biased, both treating physician as well as patient found that injury recovery went smoothly and quickly. The goal of this paper is to share this experience with other sports doctors and to invite the medical community to design randomized trials to confirm the clinical experience with this easy and safe technique. Unfortunately, the injectate is inexpensive and cannot be patented, making the product uninteresting for medical companies.

History of Glucopuncture

“…The term "glucopuncture" is designed to bring more attention to this technique among the general public as well as among family physicians and sports doctors who still adhere to steroid injections from the 1970s. In the 21st century, new publications about glucopuncture started to appear for treatment of sports injuries [34], tennis elbow [35], rotator cuff related shoulder pain [36], tension headache [37], Achilles tendinopathy [38], carpal tunnel syndrome [39,40,41,42], failed back surgery syndrome [43,44,45], nerve hydrodissection [46,47], hamstring injury [48], postherpetic neuralgia [49,50], pronator teres syndrome [51], joint pain [52] and lumbar facet joint syndrome [53]. Recently it has been confirmed that D5W can be injected into fascia to enhance biotensegrity [54].…”