How many weeks for a sprained ankle to heal

Loop the other end around your foot. Slowly pull the foot toward you. Ankle eversion. Seated on the floor, with an elasticized band or tubing tied around the injured foot and anchored around your uninjured foot, slowly turn the injured foot outward.

Ankle inversion. Seated on the floor, cross your legs with your injured foot underneath. With an elasticized band or tubing around the injured foot and anchored around your uninjured foot, slowly turn the injured foot inward.

Standing stretch. Stand one arm's length from the wall. Place the injured foot behind the other foot, toes facing forward. Keep your heels down and the back knee straight.

Slowly bend the front knee until you feel the calf stretch in the back leg. Hold for 15—20 seconds. Repeat 3—5 times. Seated stretch. Loop an elasticized band or tubing around the ball of the foot. Keeping the knee straight, slowly pull back on the band until you feel the upper calf stretch.

Hold for 15 seconds. Repeat 15—20 times. Stand facing a wall with your hands on the wall for balance. Rise up on your toes. Hold for 1 second, then lower yourself slowly to the starting position. Repeat 20—30 times. As you become stronger, do this exercise keeping your weight on just the injured side as you lower yourself down. Stand with your toes and the ball of the affected foot on a book or the edge of a stair. Your heel should be off the ground.

Use a wall, chair, or rail for balance. Hold your other foot off the ground behind you, with knee slightly bent. Slowly lower the heel. Hold the position for 1 second. Return to the starting position. Repeat up to 15 times, several times a day. Walking is not usually possible. For more information about how the board-certified surgeons, orthopaedic team, or physical therapists at ORTHOKnox can treat you, call , or fill out our easy-to-use online appointment request form.

We look forward to hearing from you! OrthoKnox provides comprehensive orthopedic services, sports medicine , and physical therapy to treat and rehabilitate injuries and degenerative conditions that affect the upper and lower extremities, including the shoulder , elbow, hip, knee , and ankle. This is often a delayed presentation because, usually, we expect these to get better.

I think a lot of minor osteochondral injuries do happen with these injuries but they get better on their own and don't need any additional treatment other than the standard treatment for an ankle sprain. Again, these patients, usually day to day living, this is not a big deal, but it's when they try to ramp up to more strenuous activities that they can't get back there. The pain is often poorly localized. They kind of just feel it deep in the ankle, and it doesn't always correlate.

If they feel the pain on the inside part of the ankle, they can still have the lesion on the outside part of the ankle. It's pretty classic that they're very bad at localizing where the injury is. X-rays are often negative. Sometimes, you can see some lucency in the talus that suggests there's an injury there but, in more acute injuries, it's often very hard to see, so MRI or CT scan can be very helpful. In younger patients, a period of casting can be helpful to get this to heal.

In older patients, and I'm not talking that old, but really past adolescence, oftentimes surgery is necessary to clean out the area of cartilage injury. We'll often drill into the bone in that area to try to stimulate the body to form some scar cartilage over that region. This is an arthroscopy. What you can see here is this is a flap of cartilage that's coming up from the normal cartilage surface here. That's part of that cartilage injury. What we've done now is we've basically cleaned out that loose cartilage.

Now, we have a stable edge of cartilage. Here is exposed bone. This is a significant injury, where you lose cartilage. We then drill into the bone and what we want to see is this little bit of bleeding here. That's those good marrow elements that have a lot of stem cells and multi-potential healing cells that can form some scar cartilage over this whole area so that at least that joint has a better gliding surface.

That seems to help very well in most patients. Scenario 3 , a year-old female with multiple prior ankle sprains. Her last sprain was about eight months ago. She has persistent pain and swelling, doesn't trust her ankle.

She avoids sports. She has several episodes of giving way over the past six months. You examine her in the office, and this is just the textbook image that we saw earlier. Again, you see this sort of dimple sign. There's clear anterior instability. A patient who continues to be unstable at this stage, with giving-way episodes, they will often benefit at first from a course of physical therapy if they haven't had that already.

That's really to focus on proprioception and strengthening of the surrounding musculature to see if that can be adequately Sorry, to see if that can adequately restore their sense of stability and allow them to return to activity. These patients often need bracing for more strenuous sporting activity to give them the sense of stability that they need. If those things fail, then surgery to repair the ligament is often very helpful.

This is a diagram of the classic Brostrom-type repair. This is the fibula right here. This is the calcaneofibular ligament, which has been cut and shortened and repaired. You don't always actually have to repair this.

The most important part is repairing what's called the anterior talofibular ligament. That ligament is actually underneath here. This is the extensor retinaculum, which holds down the tendons on the front of the ankle. We incorporate that into the repair for some additional stability.

Underneath that is the ligament repair. That's very successful surgery. People do very well with that and they're able to return to most sporting activities, but it does take about six months before they can go back to real strenuous activity. Scenario 4 is an year-old football player who twisted his ankle on the turf about a month ago. They did rest, ice, compression, elevation, and told him he'd be better in a couple weeks because it didn't look like that bad a sprain but he continues to have significant pain, pointing to the anterolateral aspect of the ankle.

The pain travels up the leg from that point. X-rays are negative, but an MRI shows this fluid right here in the recess of the syndesmosis.

This, as we talked about earlier, is a syndesmotic injury, or your classic high ankle sprain. This is the injury to the syndesmotic ligaments that connect the fibula to the tibia, and so, when the ankle externally rotates, that's what puts stress on these ligaments.

You can diagnose this with what's called a squeeze test where you squeeze the fibula against the tibia proximally in the leg, just below the knee. Schrayer, M. Willenborg, M. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Careers at OA. Doctors Jeffery S.

Cantrell Kent F. Dickson J. David Evanich Brady G. Giesler James R. Heerwagen John C. McElroy Aaron D. Schrayer Manuj C. Singhal Ian G. Wilkofsky Michael J. April 16, Blog , Foot and Ankle 0.