medspin Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
What Happens When A Boxer Is Beaten To Death, And How We Can Stop it
After Jermichael Finley's recent spinal cord injury, a sportswriting friend of mine shook his head and referred to football as “America's sickness.” As severe as it was, though, Finley's injury wasn't nearly the worst a professional athlete suffered last weekend. On Saturday night, 26-year-old jun...
It's Too Soon To Say That Jermichael Finley Is "Going To Be Fine"
For the second time in the past month, Green Bay Packers tight end Jermichael Finley has sustained a serious head injury while playing football. And while he appears to be recovering movement following a temporary paralysis immediately after the injury, it's a stark reminder that the effects of head...
Does Dustin Pedroia—Or Any Pro Athlete—Have A Right To Privacy?
The bearded, hundred-million-dollar face of the Red Sox franchise played through much of the 2013 season with an injury he wishes you never heard about. And the thing is, maybe you shouldn't have. ...
Retired NFL Players Shown To Have Humongous Brain Deficits
Retired NFL players' brains don't work nearly as efficiently as they should. And while that sounds like one more brick on the wall of evidence that football is awful for your brain, it actually goes a little deeper. ...
Could Modern Medicine Have Saved Bo Jackson's Career?
I was too young to remember watching him play, but the unifying tone of wonderment emanating from anyone who saw Bo Jackson crack a 500-foot home run or bulldoze an obnoxious Brian Bosworth into traction has never washed with the plainness of the injury that ended his career. It doesn't make sense. ...
Heat Trainers Measure Greg Oden's Knees After Every Single Practice
Here's a telling bit from a TrueHoop piece on Greg Oden over the weekend. ...
What Is MRSA? The Disgusting Infection Riddling The Buccaneers
Another Buccaneer has come down with methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA (commonly pronounced "mersa"), because apparently playing for the Buccaneers is like rinsing a paper cut in a septic tank. But what is MRSA?...
So there is a Mr. A?
Preseason football brought methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) back into the limelight with multiple Buccaneers coming down with serious infections. Thanks to Twitter’s unfiltered access to everyone, this news came out via an airing of grievances over missed diagnoses and the team’s s...
The Hidden Victims Of The NFL's Concussion Crisis
Late last fall, as the NFL playoff picture began to take shape, I was summoned to the psychiatric ward of my hospital. As an HIV specialist, I routinely encounter patients with mental health issues who have trouble taking their medications, but when I read the page requesting my consultation, I noti...
What Really Went Wrong With Rob Gronkowski's Arm Surgeries?
Hours after the 2013 Super Bowl, Rob Gronkowski danced on stage at Encore, the kind of Vegas club you pray your friends never drag you to. As I watched the inevitable TMZ video—Gronk body-slammed a pal onstage—I was less interested in Gronk Gronking than in the black cast encasing his left forearm. ...
Because Smart Shouldn't Be Stupid, We'll Be Regressing
Science lies at the heart of nearly every sports story of any consequence—the mysteries of brain damage, the seasonal hysterias over performance-enhancing drugs, the progression of sports analytics from the interstices of the common box score to the movement of the human body, the number of non-alc...
How Will A Meniscus Tear Affect Russell Westbrook?
We learned today that Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook will undergo surgery for a torn lateral meniscus in his right knee. This is great news for Western Conference hopefuls and bad news for anyone who loves basketball: We still don't know how long he'll be out, and the NBA playoffs without Westbro...
How An Achilles Tear Affects NBA Players (Or, Why Kobe Is Screwed)
Kobe Bryant, your favorite high-functioning sociopath and mine, tore his Achilles tendon Friday night during a win against the Warriors. We've been hearing about "torn Achilles" for years now, but for most fans, the operational definition of the injury remains ambiguous. You hear a player has torn a...
The Coming War: A Military Doctor's Field Guide To Masturbating In Afghanistan
The past decade of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has given military physicians such as myself the important opportunity to gather unprecedented data on some of our most pressing medical issues. This data set has spurred advances in the care of trauma, hemorrhagic shock, traumatic brain i...
Did Derrick Rose's Shoes Cause His Knee Injury?
Today, Chicago froths at a Nike shoe designer, Jason Petrie, who tweeted on Saturday that Derrick Rose should have signed with Nike, like LeBron did. LeBron, wrote Petrie, was only getting stronger, while Rose, thanks to his high-top adiZero Rose 2.5's, was toast, with a torn ACL....
Twenty Citizens' Worth Of Blood Flowed Through Him: A Medic Confronts The Open Wounds Of Afghanistan
This was originally written for Deadspin's Blood Week, but shit happens and we're running it now....