As athletic training students, and any other allied medical area of study, acronyms are used all the time. Early on in my studies we learned the acronym FOOSH to remember the mechanism of injury (how an injury occurred to cause it) of many wrist pathologies. I thought this post would be good because of Holly Brooks recent wrist injury could have occurred from a FOOSH. Alright, so what is FOOSH?

FOOSH: Falling On (an) OutStretched Hand

We’ve all probably heard this before, but when you are falling you’re supposed to roll or let your body absorb the fall? The last thing you want to do is throw your arm straight out, stiff as a board, to try and catch all of your body weight. Last time I checked your body weighs a lot more than one arm. Of course, we don’t have much time to process how to soften our fall as we are doing the said falling. This causes us to hurt our wrists! FOOSH can lead to multiple injuries including, but not limited to: TFCC injury, dislocation of the lunate bone, Kienböck’s Disease,  scaphoid fracture, hamate fracture, strained wrist ligaments, etc

Don’t think that since we are skiers we are safe from this injury! I was cheering on some junior skiers, and chatted with a boy who did the exact thing I am describing. 

See the large glove and padding attached to the pole? FOOSH injury, he was protecting his cast underneath.

Be careful out there!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 7:08 pm and is filed under General, Injuries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.