Monday, December 26, 2005

What We Do

Happy Holidays everyone! I'd like to thank Michael for the generous invitation to guest blog for this week. He and I struck up a conversation a few months back about one of his blog post, and now, here I am. Because I'm one of the few non-lawyers in the guest-blogger stable, I thought I'd open the week with a little information about my profession, athletic training, and try to answer the question, "Why is an athletic trainer reading the Sports Law Blog?"

In a bit of serendipitous media syngery, today's edition of the NYT is carrying two stories that serve as perfect segues into a brief discussion about the role and responsibilities of athletic trainers. The first is a story about the 20th anniversary of Joe Theismann's Monday Night Football injury. (The second is a story about sport-related spinal cord injury, but unfortunately, access is limited to Times Select subscribers, so I'll ignore it here). Theismann's injury, an open tibia-fibula fracture, was similar to the one in the picture above. Gruesome, I know, but also an important reminder of the severity and seriousness of injury that can occur to athletes at all levels of competition. As many of you know, that injury cost Theismann's his career. On a more general note, musculoskeletal ailments are now the most commonly given reason for physician visits. Of the 35 million American kids playing organized sport, it's estimated that 10% will be injured, and most of those will be orthopaedic-related injuries

For many people involved in sport or physical activity, athletic trainers (ATs) serve as the primary point of care for preventative, emergency, and rehabilitative medical services. We are employed at all levels of amatuer and professional sports, and in many oupatient therapy clinics. We work very closely with our directing physicians (team physicians in most cases) in the provision of athletic health care. In addition to preparing Theismann and his teammates for competition (with padding, taping and bracing, nutritional advice, training and conditioning, etc.), ATs, along with the team physicians, would have been primarilty responsible for the acute management of his injury. In many cases, they would then also be responsible for the rehabilitation and return to play of the athlete. I'll spare you more details - you can read more about the profession at the National Athletic Trainer's Association website. I'd especially encourage you to read some of these facts about ATs.

Why would an athletic training / sports health care professor, or any AT for that matter, be interested in the Sports Law Blog? Well, I happen to teach a course on current legal and professional issues facing ATs which is how I first stumbled across the site. ATs, like many other allied health care professionals, are increasingly faced with a myriad of legal issues, including malpractice and negligence claims, risk management, patient confidentiality, drug testing, etc. This blog has proven to be a helpful and provocative resource on many of these issues. So, my goal for this week then, is to try to approach some of these and related topics from the "sports" health care standpoint.

I look forward to discussing more of these issues as the week goes on. If you have any specific ideas for topics, please let me know.

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