We're on again

Start of a new work week and we now have skiable snow at most of the Scottish resorts, including CairnGorm - my local area. People are asking me what's new for this season and, if you've had a look at www.ski-injury.com there are really two things that stand out for me. Firstly, the commercial release of the Knee Binding, and secondly the focus being increasingly placed on wrist injury prevention for snowboarders. The Knee Binding is explained in full on my website, with links to the manufacturer's site as well. I know that opinions on these sort of developments will always be mixed, but let's hope it does make a positive contribution. A major problem will be actually analysing its effect - the only way to really do so is to conduct a randomised controlled trial where you take two (large) groups of skiers - similar to each other in all respects (age, gender, size, ability etc etc) except that one group skis using the Knee Binding and the other group uses standard bindings and then see if there is any difference in ACL injury rates at the end of the study. This is a huge study to undertake. Not impossible by any means, but it would need alot of funding and organisation. Without it though, I fear that we will be left with anecdotal evidence from individual skiers' experiences which is never that easy to analyse.

With regard to wrist guards, we do already have alot of information and this season the ski patrol injury forms for Scotland have been modified so that we can look at this closer. We will be documenting the exact type of wrist guard worn by both injured and uninjured boarders and doing a comparision. I also hope to redo the snowboarding study that i first completed in 2004 looking at attitudes to wrist guards, helmets and risk taking in general amongst this group. The original results caused a bit of a stir and it will be interesting to see what if anything has changed in the last 5 years. A medical student colleague of mine will be doing the same work in New Zealand and we'll see if there are any big differences between boarders in the two countries.

So, hope you get enough snow for a Christmas slide yourselves and remember - stay safe on snow.