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Patrick Brown
Mrs. DeBock
English 4
25 February 2016
The Importance of ACL Prevention
The Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) is located where the end of the thigh bone, the
femur, meets the top of the shin bone or the tibia. Millions of people around the world participate
on some sort of sport, playing what they were taught when they were young and what they love.
For those millions 300,000 suffer from the most devastating knee injury that an individual could
have happen to them, which would be tearing their Anterior Cruciate Ligament (Donnell-Fink).
ACL prevention should increase dramatically because more than 250,000 people (Donnell-Fink)
suffer from the injury every year, most of the people that have torn their ACL have extreme
trouble or do not even get to go back to the sport they once loved to play and lastly although
surgery does repair the knee and the ACL, it scars the patients afterward.
In sports, most players have to cut, pivot, or jump. With those players cutting and
jumping, they put themselves at a higher risk for serious knee injuries, including tearing the
ACL. Approximately 7.6 million kids play high school sports and have a 3-11% chance in
getting a sports scholarship, but the most occurring injury that prevents high school students
from playing and getting those scholarships are knee injuries with a 10-25% chance (DonnellFink). The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has established itself as a fast and non-invasive
imaging altering the way doctor looks at knee injuries (Yaqoob). If we have technology as
advance and helpful as that then there should be some sort of machine or equipment that prevents
serious knee injury or ACL tears.

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Essentially the knee is a hinge joint connected by four major ligaments. The four joints
are the lateral collateral (LCL), the posterior cruciate (PCL), the medial collateral (MCL) and
lastly but most importantly the anterior cruciate (ACL) (Marx). In the book The ACL Solution, it
discusses how someone would know if they had torn their ACL, most cases saying that they
heard a pop noise when the incident occurred (Marx). Also the book talks about the procedures
you need to take if you so suffer from the devastating injury like icing the knee or keeping
pressure off of it by using crutches. Many people tear the ACL in a game and do not know that
they have a serious injury so they continue playing. When they continue playing, they put
themselves at risk by damaging the ligament even more. Depending on the severity of the tear,
you might not need surgery which is a great thing not to get, but if you continue playing you put
yourself at the risk of surgery which has many bad effects afterward.
Furthermore, the surgery itself it the last possible thing anybody that has a torn ACL
wants. The surgery does have some good effects like repairing the ACL and depending on who
you have as your surgeon, putting a player back out on the field after a long period of time. But
most of the effects after the surgery are not ideal. Suffering a serious knee injury is bad enough
but the ACL surgery rehabilitation surgery may result in instability in the knee, damage to
menisci or cartilage, reconstructive surgery and early osteoarthritis (Donnell-Fink). In The ACL
Solution, the book goes into detail about the surgical procedure or the reconstruction of the
knee, explaining from start to finish about the painful procedure and how they operate, and also
what you need to do after the surgery and how to prevent from any other knee injury (Marx). The
fact of the matter is that after surgery, the patient isnt themselves going back into whatever they
had been doing, especially when going back to sports.

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Overall, the Anterior Cruciate Ligament is crucial to the human body and should have
much more preventions than doctors have now. Many kids have a dream to be an athlete when
they grow up but the ones that suffer from the devastating injury do not get the chance to get
back out there and train for the dream they wanted. In conclusion, ACL prevention shouldnt be
taken lightly and doctors should come up with a better plan to help prevent ACL tears because
over 250,000 people (Donnell-Fink) suffer from the devastating injury every year, the injury
itself is extremely painful and prohibits many from going back to the sport they played and loved
and lastly surgery can hurt the human body down the road and has many bad effects to the body.

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Works Cited
Donnell-Fink, Laurel A., et al. "Effectiveness Of Knee Injury And Anterior Cruciate Ligament
Tear Prevention Programs: A Meta-Analysis." Plos ONE 10.12 (2015): 1-17.Academic
Search Complete. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.
Marx, Robert, Grethe Myklebust, and Brian W. Boyle. The ACL Solution: Prevention and
Recovery for Sports' Most Devastating Knee Injury. New York: Demos HEALTH, 2012.
Print.
Yaqoob, Jamal, Muhammad Shahbaz Alam, and Nadeem Khalid. "Diagnostic Accuracy Of
Magnetic Resonance Imaging In Assessment Of Meniscal And ACL Tear: Correlation
With Arthroscopy." Pakistan Journal Of Medical Sciences 31.2 (2015): 263-268.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.