These type of injuries can be caused by a wide range of occurrences, including car accidents, sports injuries and even accidents around the home or workplace. These injuries will normally require a cast or brace be used to immobilise the joint for 30-40 days. After this period, the ankle will be extremely rigid in all planes (flexion-extension, and inversion-eversion) and muscle hypotrophy will be eviden
If you have experienced this kind of injury and come to us for your rehabilitation, it is very important that you bring any X-rays of the area with you, in particular those taken after the cast has been removed. These X-rays inform your doctor of whether or not your malleoli are in line – if they are not, successful rehabilitation becomes impossible.
Rehabilitation of these kinds of injuries can take a long time. Physical and pharmacological strategies will be used to reduce pain and swelling and manual lymph drainage is often required. Further on in the process, proprioceptive exercises will be introduced alongside load progression to help strengthen the muscles around the ankle.
In-pool rehabilitation is very effective when treating these kinds of injuries as it allows the patient to re-develop their gait with minimal loading. These injuries can be especially disruptive to a patient’s life due to the immobilisation of the leg. We try to help our patients achieve the basics needed for them to go back to living a normal life (helping them to drive, walk without crutches, and eventually return to sport or their usual activities).
Malleolar fracture surgery
These are the most common fractures of the inferior limb: they involve the internal and external malleolus, sometimes adjoined by ankle ligament lesions. Fracture involving two malleoli and the posterior part of tibia is defined trimalleolar fracture.
Probably you suffered from a trauma subsequent to a car crash, a sports trauma or an accidental fall.
According to the different type of fracture, there are various surgical treatments to undergo. Numerous synthetic bone substitutes are used as well as an external fixators.
You will be able to start a rehabilitation period after some time of mobilisation with a plaster or fixator. It is important for you to know that the rehabilitation suggested for this type of pathology is a long-term one and challenging, requiring on average 4 months achieving a discreet recovery of the functionality and 8 months recovering the agonistic sports activity.
Generally, the synthetic bone substitutes are removed a year after surgery. Rehabilitation after the removal of these synthetic bone substitutes will take almost one month..
