Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL)
The Anterior Cruciate Ligament most widely known as the ACL is one of the four major ligaments of the knee. (The other three ligaments are the Medial Collateral Ligament, [MCL] the Posterior Cruciate Ligament, [PCL] and the Lateral Collateral Ligament [LCL]. The ACL is the main stabilizing ligament in the knee, and connects the femur to the tibia.
I chose this topic because as an athlete an ACL injury is not uncommon in athletes. There are an estimated 80,000 annual ACL tears in the USA; 56,000 occur during sports. Basketball and soccer might account for two-thirds of the ACL injuries suffered by U.S. athletes.[1] As a basketball player that automatically increases the likelihood of an ACL injury being suffered by me. It is not necessarily an extremely difficult injury to obtain. Basketball players have a propensity to get the injury just from doing a normal routine like playing defense or running.
The most recent ACL injury in professional basketball was suffered by a second year player from Gonzaga University, Charlotte Bobcats forward, Adam Morrison. He is a very young player, only five years older than older than I am, so the injury is not really an injury that comes from aging. He was playing in a game, and just playing defense on another player, and he just fell, and grabbed his knee. This is said to be an extremely painful injury, and it happened to leave Adam Morrison lying on the court for some time in extreme pain and had to be helped off of the court. Once you get a knee injury that is serious you have to get X-rays and MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) to look inside the body, and see the damage that is accompanied by the injury. When Adam Morrison got his X-ray and MRI, the results showed that he had a partial to complete tear of his ACL, and he is facing season-ending surgery.
What happens when an ACL tears as a result from playing sports is that the person who gets injured either gets hit from the side, or...