Knee braces as "protective equipment"?

[MxMom94]

Hi Dr. Mark--or anyone else who may have an educated opinion on what might be best.

My son is 12 and getting to that very competitive stage in racing (last year first injury with compound fracture radius/ulna). He wears a "knee pad" type knee brace made by SixSixOne, but I have had some people suggest we place him in a more formal knee brace for racing to actually prevent knee injuries. While I want to provide the best protective equipment, I really don't want to go out and get a pair of *knee braces, or something comparitive at $400-$600 unless it really is going to help.

I know when we had the injury last summer our insurance would not cover the CTI wrist brace that we wanted to get, and in all honesty, he probably didn't knee since he went back to racing early and his ortho said it probably would be better not to have something that would restrict his range of motion so he wouldn't lock it. (trottle arm of course).

So, my question is--how great are these expensive knee braces at minimizing an injury? At 12 I'm just waiting for a bit of a growth spurt as he's actually pretty small still.

Thanks for any advise.
Dawn Bristlin

[drmark]

There is a huge amount of emotion in this subject, but almost no science that shows the efficacy of knee bracing (that is if you exclude the studies funded by the manufacturers).

I wear a neoprene knee sleeve. Over that I wear my shin protector that has a clamshell over the patella.

My advice is to spend the big bucks on something cool for the bike, or a family vacation.

[iphorde]

I can tell you the EVS Web Braces don't work.