Dear Friends I have been practicing shotokan Karate (JKA style) for over 50 years. During that time and especially during the past 20 years or so, I noticed that many of my friends and colleagues were being felled by injuries requiring surgery. With each passing year more people I knew had surgery.I began to wonder why this was so. After doing some preliminary research, it became apparent that the incidence of such injuries seemed to exceed that of the national norm. And, after I myself needed hip replacement,( after having had two knee surgeries) a friend of mine who was a pediatrician asked me "what will I do to prevent my son (who has been training for over 30 years) from also needing such surgical intervention"? I had no answer. I decided to begin to research this area to see the relationship between long term training and orthopedic degeneration. Was training causing orthopedic problems? The first step in this scientific inquiry is to see how many of us are having problems. I developed this karate injury survey to answer that question. For the past two months, I have been asking karate people to answer my completely anonymous survey. Presently, I have over 880 respondents. Of these about 260 are shotokan and 280 are from a style labeled "other". Presently, I am looking for more folks from shitoryu, wado-ryu and goju-ryu to answer my survey. This is the first time, in my knowledge, that any scientific survey has been undertaken to examine our training habits and our long term injuries. I can not over emphasize the importance of this research. Are we doing any thing wrong in the way we train? By simply ignoring this issue, we are potentially hurting ourselves, our children and our students. We need to know if there is anything wrong with what we are doing. Then we can address the next issue: what can be done to correct it. So, please take about ten minutes out of your busy lives and answer my survey. Your karate training future may depend on it! The link is https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KarateInjurySurvey Thank you Dr. Alex Sternberg DrPHc MPH,Sc.D, M.Sc. Assoc.Prof: Division of Athletic Training, Health and Exercise Science -Long Island Univ.(adj.) Director:Pediatric Pulmonary Function, and Exercise Testing Laboratory (ret.) Clinical Instructor: Dep't Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine Downstate Medical Center
