Guest Post: Interview w/Dr. Hewett RE:ACL

Hi, I would like to introduce myself, my name is Sasha Sibree. I’m a Physical Therapist in Denver, Colorado. BoDPT has kindly allowed me to do a guest blog post, I would like to thank him for the opportunity.

Basically I wanted a way to combine two of my interests – building web sites and furthering my Physical Therapy knowledge.

So what I did was go out and interview a whole bunch of rehab experts, and then make those interviews available, free of charge, on my web site PhysicalTherapyContinuingEducation.Org.

Here are some excerpt from a recent interview with Dr Timothy Hewett about his work with ACL Injuries and Prevention.

PhysicalTherapyContinuingEducation.Org: Is there a different mechanism, when comparing males and females, in non contact ACL injuries?

Dr Timothy Hewett: So, what we’ve done is we’ve looked at the mechanisms of how men and women tear their ACLs. Basically, if you look at the mechanisms, in women especially, there are four common components.

As the woman lands her knee buckles inward. The knee is relatively straight when she lands. Most if not all of her weight is on a single foot or single leg. And her trunk tends to be tilted laterally. In other words, her center of mass is outside of her foot base of support.

These mechanisms also occur in men but, for instance, the exaggeration of the positioning of the trunk is much greater in women than men. We’ve published several studies on this. We published last year, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, a study showing the relationship in women between the amount of trunk lean and the risk of ACL tear.

I’ve also done collaborations with the biomechanics lab at Yale where we’ve showed in varsity athletes, women who are not good at sensing the position of their trunk in three-dimensional space, or allow greater motion of their trunk following a perturbation or disturbance of their trunk, have greater risk of future knee ligament and ACL tears.


Dr Hewett shares a ton of great information in this 46 minute interview. Including expanding on the four different components, the best way to screen for thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhe “at risk” athlete, and what interventions can decrease their risk.

I invite you to visit my site at Physical Therapy Continuing Education.Org to listen to or download the entire interview.

Thanking you,
Sasha Sibree PT
Physical Therapy Continuing Education.Org