Editorial

Ankle injuries are among the most common injuries that orthopedic physiotherapists treat on a day-to-day basis. The most common of these injuries are the ankle sprain and ankle fracture. An ankle sprain obviously results in an acute injury but in some cases this can lead to chronic ankle instability.

In this edition of the ODR we review three peer-reviewed journal articles and present one original submission. Our articles explore evidence based treatment, manual therapy and taping techniques for acute and chronic ankle injuries. Amy Dinaut submitted the original submission, a case study involving a patient with chronic ankle injury.

The first article by Lin, Hiller and Bie (2010) provides a concise review of the literature on treatment of ankle sprains, fractures and chronic ankle instability. This article is a clinical perspective and presents the results of many randomized control trials and systematic reviews. Interestingly, the authors find strong evidence for use of functional support (ie bracing) versus manual therapy in the treatment of ankle instability.

Hopper, Samsson, Hulenik, Ng, Hall, & Robinson (2009) published the second article examining the effectiveness of mulligan ankle taping to treat chronic ankle instability. The mulligan taping technique is often applied after use of the common mobilization with movement technique to improve alignment and movement of the ankle. This particular taping technique involves much less tape than the traditional enclosed ankle taping commonly applied in practice. However, the effectiveness of the mulligan taping technique is questionable, which the authors investigate in this original research.

The final article is hot of the press, published in the January/February edition of JOSPT. Published by Bezallet. al (2012) the article is another original piece of clinical research. The authors were interested in determining the effectiveness of manipulation on chronic ankle instability. The results of this study were not favorable for joint manipulation but the authors do identify several limitations to their study and possible future directions.