Just as adults can suffer from pains in their muscles and joints, children and teenagers can too. These postures can relate to postures they adopt, sporting and general injuries or growth related pains. Growth pain that is vague and intermittent down the legs is common in 3 – 12 year olds and is called idiopathic. This may be related to muscle tightness and it will usually go away by itself.

Other common pains related to children that usually don’t go away by themselves include knee pain, heel pain, foot pains, leg pains, back pain and shoulder pains. These pains will benefit from Physiotherapy assessment to determine the cause of the pain and work out the best from of treatment and advice to fix the problem. Correcting these problems in the growing child can both help their current pains and help reduce the likelihood of taking problems into adulthood.

Sporting injuries in the teenage years become common and again addressing the problem with Physiotherapy speeds recovery and prevents poor movement patterns  and habits developing. Correcting the biomechanical loading in the young athlete helps reduce problems in the mature athlete.

Published in “The Village Observer”, December 2012. Written by Burns Bay Physiotherapy.