Lateral Ankle Sprain: Reducing Swelling and Bruising using Kinesiotape

About a week ago, my wife was at work and turned in such a way that she ended up rolling her ankle pretty badly.  She has had a history of rolling the same ankle to the point that if you even look at it funny, it will roll, and she would probably agree that I am not exaggerating.  She had decide that it was best not to take her shoe off until she got home and was given an ice pack about the size of a smurf to put on it in the meantime.  Being a Chiropractor and the loving husband that I am, I took a look at her ankle and saw that the area around her lateral malleolus (the bony bump on the side of your ankle) was about 2-3 times bigger compared to the other ankle.  It really looked as if she had a golf ball in her ankle.  I had her ice it with a proper sized ice pack for 20 mins at a time and had her stay off it as much as possible.  The swelling did go down a bit but not a whole lot, so I had mentioned that there was a Kinesiotape application that I could do that would help reduce the swelling and brusing that was still there. 

Lateral View

Now, I should mention that when I first met my wife, she was a little unsure about chiropractic and did not know much about it.  Five years later, she knows when something doesn't feel right and has me adjust her, including her neck, so she trusts me enough to try the Kinesiotape on her ankle (been also doing Acupuncutre on her, too).  Since I am new to kinesiotaping and have not had a whole lot of practice with it since the seminar I took in July, I knew how to cut and apply the tape, but had to refer to a manual as for the placement of the tape for a lateral ankle sprain.  It's hard to tell in the pictures how bad the swelling was and I didn't think about taking a before picture until after I had finished taping.  Normally, Kinesiotape can stay on for 3-5 days even with washing, but where I had put the ends, some of them starting peeling off when she wore shoes.  So I ended up re-taping within about 24 hours.  After a total of 48 hours with the tap and a few icings, the tape was removed to assess how her ankle was doing.  The swelling had reduced by about 3/4 and what little bruising there was had shifted some in between the lattice of tape and some settled underneath the malleolus.  This is what her ankle looked like after 48 hours with the Kinesiotape:

For more information on Kinesiotaping, you can head over to www.easterkansaschiro.com and follow the links on the Kinesiotaping page under Services.