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- There is increasing pressure
to have young athletes push through the pain,
being driven by the desire to be the best at that sport.
- There's definitely a lot of pressure on athletes
of all kinds to go out and play through
all the little nagging injuries
that happen throughout the season.
- Athletes feel like they let people down
a little bit and also let themselves down.
- With something that's becoming more and more
of a problem as we see athletes, both young and old,
training more than ever.
- They're not stressing their body
in different ways, but they're doing very specific things
over and over and over repetitively.
- And injuries are becoming worse and worse.
- That's an overuse injury.
We can break down overuse injuries into two main categories.
Acute injuries or chronic injuries.
- With an acute injury a patient can usually identify
the exact cause of what happened.
- I heard a pop and I fell down and I was like,
things hurt sometimes but you can push through it.
I just remember standing up,
and it's like my leg didn't work.
- She tore her ACL as well as her meniscus.
In order to be able to allow her safely to get back
to playing a sport like lacrosse,
we needed to go in surgically.
- I had never dreamed of having an injury like that,
that would have such a long recovery.
- Chronic injuries are different in that
it's usually an acute injury that hasn't healed.
- I was dealing with a lot of
dull pain through practice.
Pain would be worse one day,
feel a little better the next day and then come right back.
You know you wanna be there for your team
and you're just out there trying
to play through it as best you can.
- We knew that there were a number of things going on
in his knee and there were a couple of
different things to address surgically.
The goal of which is to give him pain relief
that he hasn't been able to have otherwise.
- Surgery is the first step in the process of the recovery,
but there's still several steps that need to happen
for that patient to heal effectively.
- [Colleen] We're asking them
to go back to foundational movements
and those type of activities tend to be more mentally taxing
than actually physically taxing.
- When you're going in there every day
doing the same routine, obviously you're going through
a lot of physical rehab,
but you're also going through a tough mental process.
- I became really really depressed after my surgery.
I felt so lost.
- [Dr. Gardner] Really coming to grips with that emotional
and psychological side of the injury is very important.
It's actually often that piece to it
that drives the physical recovery.
- [Dr. Medvecky] Once their pain starts to subside,
that's when they feel, okay the clock is on.
They have to get back into their sport right away.
- As I always say, we can't outpace biology.
- [Dr. Medvecky] That's where we properly guide
the rehabilitation process.
- In the rehabilitation process,
it's critical that we correct patient's movement strategies
in order to reduce the risk of potential reinjury.
- [Dr. Gardner] Being able to retrain and reprogram
those movement patterns is one of the essential parts
of what we call neuromuscular training programs.
- [Dr. Medvecky] This is really balance, coordination,
what's called proprioception,
which is knowing where your body is in space.
- You learn a lot more of the technicalities
of every day living.
- This really allows us to move away from the
somewhat arbitrary guidelines for rehab
that have things happening by dates on a calendar
rather than the achievement
of different milestones along the process.
Data really is something that is becoming
increasingly valuable, being different types of
strength tests or functional tests that simulate the motions
that might happen during sports,
to be able to provide some objective feedback
about where they are in the rehab process.
Especially for an athlete who is usually quite goal-driven,
to give them numbers and data to work with
can be very powerful to them.
- [Blake] When you come in every day and you're able
to actually see on paper that you're improving,
definitely helps with the mental side of things
and makes the process a little bit easier.
- [Colleen] We wanna give them a new skill set to be able
to go back to do what they want to do.
We can't make them better, they make themselves better.
Being able to see them do that is fantastic.
- I was working towards being confident again.
In myself and who I was and also
what I had the ability to do.
- [Blake] Where at one point it was something
that I would think about for entire games,
now it's something that doesn't even come to mind
when I'm playing and I can play more free
and it's definitely a lot more fun that way.
- [Erin] I was just so excited to get back out there
and just do the one thing
that I've been striving to do for so long.
- [Dr. Gardner] As an athlete, for many of us,
it remains a part of your identity
really for the rest of your life.
I was fortunate enough to have many people there
helping me during my athletic career.
And so to now be able to give that back to my patients,
to be able to help them, is incredibly fulfilling.
- Orthopedic surgery in general tends to be
very reactionary, meaning somebody has an injury or trauma
and we react to that and try to help them through that.
- [Dr. Gardner] What's exciting is what we're now able to do
to try to both prevent as well as treat injuries early
so that they don't get to the point
of needing to have a surgery.
That's where things like the biologic treatments,
stem cells and PRP are very exciting in their ability to use
and harness the body's own healing factors
to be able to heal injuries that in the past we've treated
by simply telling you to take off six or eight weeks.
It's very important to be able to make sure that we have
not only the important biologic aspects
of the injury in mind, but also the specifics of
what the patient is looking for after their recovery
to make sure that everybody's achieved their goals.