Does this sound familiar? If it does, then this isn't the first time you've done it. The first time was probably a dilly; swelling, maybe bruising, a real sense that you couldn't bear your weight. It took several days, or even weeks to get the ankle to look normal and to begin to feel some strength in it again. Since then, you've flipped it more times then you can count, but fortunately, not too seriously. But you begin to wonder if you can trust the thing again.
So what's this about, this weak ankle? Won't it ever heal? The answer is probably not. At least not without some real proactive therapy. Almost all treatment of ankle sprains is reactive. You know the RICE thing, but nothing usually preventive in nature.
Medically, they say that a sprain is worse than a break. That's because a broken bone heals, while a sprain never seems to. Let me try to explain why that is.
The ankle is a 'mortise-tenon joint'. What's that you ask? Mortise-tenons are a common means of joining pieces of wood, such as in making a chair. It is a particularly strong joint, by design incapable of movement. The mortise is a hole in one piece of wood. It can be round, square or rectangular. A tenon is a projection on another piece of wood that matches the mortise and fits into the hole. In the ankle, the mortise is formed by the two lower leg bones; the tibia and the fibula. At the ankle, these are the large bumps on either side. The tenon of the ankle joint is called the talus. The talus is roughly a rectangular cube and it fits into the bony mortise above it.
Unlike the woodworking mortise-tenon joint, the ankle does allow one range of movement. It allows you to bend your ankle up thereby raising your foot and toes off the floor (dorsiflexion). It also allows the opposite motion that of pushing your foot and toes down (plantarflexion). What the mortise does not allow is sideways movement. It is this sideways rotation of the foot and ankle that caused the sprain.
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