Elite Sports

Treat injuries before they happen

In 2004, researches at the University of North California, using sensors installed in American football helmets, discovered that many collisions involved forces comparable to that of a vehicle hitting a wall at 25 miles per hour. So it’s no surprise that, perhaps more than any other sport, the team doctor is one of the most important players on the field.

It’s probably the most prestigious job in sports medicine and the one under the most pressure from players, the league, sponsors and fans. Scott A. Rodeo is the head team physician for the New York Giants. Rodeo was also team doctor for the U.S. Olympic swimming team in Athens, Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro. He is a professor of orthopaedic surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and co-President Emeritus of sports surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. He spoke with SHA Magazine about his work and what we can learn for our everyday health from treating super-athletes.

“One of the things I like the most about this work, as a doctor, is that you can be in the field where the injuries occur and then go back and see how it happened on video, see the exact movement that caused it, and act immediately and follow up with the patient. There is all kind of sophisticated medical imaging, such as on-the-spot MRIs, so doctors are working with an extraordinary amount of information about injury. You can decide on the best treatment and the best people to do it and recruit them to work on your team. You learn a lot that you can apply to patients who aren’t elite athletes”.

To read the full article, get your copy of SHA Magazine here.