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Webwise

Stop surfing around and let AW Basics do the legwork for you instead. Every week we profile the most informative and inspirational sites on the net

►  www.sportsinjuryclinic.net

IF you are injured, there is no substitute for seeing a qualified sports injury specialist. But there is also no harm in trying to pinpoint the injury yourself and applying some self-help treatment.

Indeed, some sports injury experts believe they should only make an appointment when they have first tried everything they can think of to cure their own injuries. Given that most athletics injuries have identifiable causes, it follows that the athlete, the person closest to these causes, should be in the best position to analyse and correct them.

When it comes to diagnosing injuries though, there are few better sites on the internet than sportsinjuryclinic.net. The site is a virtual sports injury therapist and can not only help you work out what your injury is, but also recommends possible courses of treatment.

This works via the simple method of clicking on the part of the body that hurts. If you click on your foot, for example, it then zooms into an anatomical diagram of the foot and you can click again to narrow the specific area down.

Say, for instance, you click on the underside and rear end of the foot, the site then narrows the possible injuries down to: plantar fasciitis, a bruised heel, Apophysitis Calcanei or Sever’s disease, Achilles Bursitis or Retrocalcaneal Bursitis, Entrapment of Nerves or Tarsel Tunnel Syndrome, Calcaneal Stress Fracture, Claw Foot, or just plain blisters.

In order to try to find out which injury you have, the site asks a series of yes/no questions in order to narrow the choices down further. The site then recommends possible treatments for that particular injury.

The site does not claim to be able to solve every injury and carries a disclaimer on the home page, which you must click to proceed. This disclaimer stresses that the site is primarily a source of information – and that is indeed its main strength.

So if you have a niggling injury, by all means book an appointment with the doc, but if you want to improve you knowledge of what the problem might be then a few minutes visiting the cyber-therapist will not do any harm.

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