medspin - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Why Do Tennis Players Grunt? Because It Works
Monica Seles gets the blame—at 93 decibels, her screams on the court were about as loud as a motorcycle, and started the run on grunting in tennis. It was frowned upon at first, but everyone's climbed on board—Djokovic, Nadal, Sharapova, Serena, and Venus, they all get their shriek on. A generatio...
No, Neymar Can't Come Back This World Cup. That Could Paralyze Him.
To the surprise of very many, when Neymar went down in the 86th minute against Colombia on Friday, the 22-year-old striker wasn't faking. After being kneed in the back by Colombia's Juan Zúñiga, Neymar was carried off the field and taken directly to a hospital, where doctors soon discovered that h...
Is Fasting For Ramadan Dangerous At The World Cup?
It's bad enough that these guys have to play in the Amazon. The weather in Brazil is so preposterously hot and humid that FIFA instituted cooling breaks so players wouldn't keel over and die during games. But what are the World Cup's Muslim players supposed to do now that Ramadan is here? The month-...
Why Do NBA Big Men Break Down?
Joel Embiid, the University of Kansas seven-footer who was expected to be the first pick in tonight's NBA draft, just had two screws inserted into the navicular bone in his right foot.1 Embiid is expected to miss 4-6 months and the stress fracture—his second in three months—may cost him millions of ...
The Gross Things Caused By Human Bite Wounds
I was sitting in my office yesterday, not watching the World Cup, when I came across a tweet by my friend: "It's kind of fun that the third-best player in the world is just definitely insane," it said. A moment later, I was watching Luis Suárez, Uruguay's star forward, take a bite out of Italian def...
Did Chewing Tobacco Kill Tony Gwynn?
On Monday, Tony Gwynn died from complications related to salivary cancer, the same disease that claimed the life of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch two years ago. When Yauch died at the hospital where I work in Manhattan, I was shaken. A whole generation got a little older that day. The thing about Yauch's i...
On The Underrated Sublimity Of Throwing Your Miserable Guts Up
I come to sing the praises of a good, hard puke....
A Combat Doctor's Field Guide To Masturbating In Afghanistan
Nine real-life scenarios from the front lines, nine field-tested solutions, courtesy our friend "Dr. Watts," a military doctor who served with the Marines Corps infantry....
"I Heard Myself Say Out Loud, 'Someone Needs To Smoke That Little Girl'"
A Marine Corps medic in Afghanistan struggles to balance Hippocrates and the demands of war. You can find the full story below. An excerpt:...
The Scientific Case Against Vibram's FiveFinger Running Shoe
Last week's class-action settlement by Vibram, an Italian footwear manufacturer known for making silly-looking lightweight running shoes, recalls the recent case against Sketchers, a company that agreed to pay out $40 million after falsely claiming that walking in its product would give you Kim Kard...
Why Is Blood Donation Still Incredibly Homophobic?
When University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam is selected in this week's NFL draft, it will be a soft milestone—the first time that an openly gay athlete is drafted into one of the major American sports—making discrimination based on sexuality seem that much more archaic. But you might not r...
Can You Predict If Your Kid Will Throw Left-Handed?
I'm at that age where my buddies from college are starting to sign their kids up for Little League. They'll differ in degree and in approach to helicopter coaching and buying up extravagant, miniaturized baseball equipment, but there's one thing they'll all agree on: They hope their kid's a lefty. ...