FOOTBALL SPINAL INJURY

[Guest guest]

An athletic trainer (Bob Duchardt) from another site kindly gave me

permission to reproduce his comments on the Elam injury situation.

Mel Siff

mcsiff@...

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Thanks for the follow-up to your original post on this issue of the spinal

injury. I have become accustomed to the thoughtfulness behind, and the

accuracy of your writing, but must confess to being concerned that this might

be one time when you had over-stepped yourself. Clearly, my concern was

premature and for that I am most thankful.

A few years ago I made the same mistake as the ATCs involved in the case you

described. On a Wednesday afternoon I was in attendance at a Junior Varsity

FB game and observed one of my kids collide violently with another producing

an axial force through his spine. He lay on the field complaining of

exquisite pain in his mid spine. I called the EMS folks and had him

transported to an ER only to find out that he had no skeletal or neurological

injury.

Then on the following Saturday one of my varsity players did the same thing.

On the field he also complained of severe mid-spine pain and I believed that

he should have been taken off on a board. But he convinced me that he could

walk off, which I allowed him to do, with apparently no difficulty. After

about 15 minutes SITTING on the bench he finally admitted that his pain was

unbearable, at which time I placed him supine and summoned the EMS. After 45

more minutes of waiting for them (don't even ask why?) his father decided to

take him to the ER which was less than 1/4 mile away. The ER Doc declared

him to be fracture free and neurologically intact and sent him home in the

car with the parents. On Monday AM a radiologist read the films and found a

compression fracture at T-7.

I concluded that:

1. I wasn't so dumb after all since the ER Doc had missed the injury with

the benefit of x-ray, and

2. I was dumber than I thought because I had been lulled into a false sense

of security with the second kid because the first kid had turned out OK even

when my index of suspicion was very high.

Incidently, neither of those kids demonstrated any neurological signs or

symptoms.

My point is that we ATCs see so much stuff that ought to be serious and which

turns out not to be so, that we begin to forget " The Rules " . Incidents such

as this current one serve to call us back to basics and to remind us of our

inherent fallibility. And rather than hammering you or anyone else for

calling us to task for screwing up, we ought to take a hard look at

ourselves and get our pompous backsides back to fundamentals. And we ought

to be thanking you or anyone else who snaps us back to attention.

So, for all of us who want to do this job correctly, Thank You!!

Bob Duchardt

duchardt@...

PS You may recall the flap over a pro basketball player's case a few years

ago when during the first half of a game he was rendered unconscious, handled

with kid gloves and by the book on the site of his injury, only to

return and play the second half of that game. Many of our ATC colleagues

called the medical staff covering that game to task for their blatant

" disregard " of " The Rules " . I can't understand why so many are attempting to

rationalize this action away.

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