PIETILA GAVE TEAM ITALY
BALANCE AT WORLD CUP

Dr. John Pietila of Richfield admits he isn’t a sports fan and hadn’t watched much soccer. Yet the 1999 BSU graduate spent much of this past summer helping Team Italy prepare for and compete at soccer’s prestigious World Cup in Brazil.

A chiropractor, he did bring a new approach to injury prevention and treatment in the locker room. Pietila’s system looks for neurological causes of brain-muscle imbalance and corrects any conflicts before an injury occurs. That differed drastically from a typical prevention approach of hitting the weight room hard, which often created more problems.

His NeuroTarget system caught the attention of Italy’s soccer brain trust, who wanted him on their sidelines.

“I gave a presentation on injury prevention in Denmark, and the doctor of the Florentina squad from Italy was intrigued,” Pietila said. An invitation followed to work with Florentina under close scrutiny from the team’s medical staff. The six-month trial period produced remarkable results.

“The head doctor meticulously tracked statistics,” Pietila said of his six-month tryout. “He found the injury rate dropped from 26 per 1,000 training hours to only four. He also found the average hamstring injury recovery time dropped from 54 days to 14.”

Those outcomes prompted an invitation to apply the system during Italy’s World Cup run, which ended with a 1-2 record in the elimination round.

Pietila brings the NeuroTarget approach when seeing patients at his Burnsville clinic, where he treats all types of conditions. “A sports injury is no different than hurting your back shoveling snow,” he said.