The Cost of Sports Injury

If you’ve been training for a while, you know the feeling. You’re doing your set, feeling good, and suddenly, something’s wrong. It may be a twinge in your back, a sharp pain in your shoulder, or a stiffness in your neck, but something is wrong. Sports injuries are part of being an athlete, no matter how good your form is, wear and tear on the body will eventually take a toll. Most of the time that toll is merely physical – some pain and the mass you lose by resting, but if you’re not smart about taking care of sports injury, you could be looking at a hefty financial toll as well.

The most common sports injuries are pretty familiar – ankle sprains, pulled groins, hamstring strains, shin splints, knee injuries and tennis elbow. You’ve probably experienced one or two in your own life, hopefully something closer to a twisted ankle than a full blown ACL tear.

The best advice for anyone recovering from any sports injury is always the same – stay off it. Your body needs time to heal, and if you push too hard, too soon you run the risk of really getting hurt. If that happens, your wallet is going to hurt more than your body.

The average physical therapy visit costs between $50-350 per visit if you’re paying out of pocket. Insurance will cover medically necessary PT, but you’ve still got to front a co-pay $10-75, or dip into your FSA or HSA.

Keep in mind that these costs are just per visit. Treatment for something as common as tennis elbow can require up to 36 physical therapy sessions. So, if you’re unlucky enough to get severe tennis elbow and you don’t have insurance, you could be spending up to $12,600 to get back in the game.

Of course, that’s just the cost of the visit. That doesn’t include therapy tools you need to buy, like foam rollers, resistance bands or medicine balls. A modestly priced bundle of those three items can easily exceed $75.

Sometimes a time crunch is unavoidable. If you’ve got a race or a competition coming up, you can’t lose valuable training time nursing an injury. That’s why Heliopatch was designed to eliminate pain and help speed recovery time. Topical pain relievers trick you into thinking you’re ready to train, which actually puts you at a greater risk for injury. Heliopatch’s new, scientific approach to pain relief neutralizes the free radicals that cause pain and slow recovery, so you’re able to get back in the gym sooner. It also costs a lot less than $12,000.