Cavs Head Team Physician on Macrotraumatic Injuries in Pro Sports (Video)

“Basketball is a contact sport. Admittedly, it’s often a collision sport. It’s amazing that we don’t have more injuries. I think it’s a testament to how elite of an athlete these guys are as well as how they take care of themselves.



Some of the common injuries, I really categorize them into two categories: One is macrotraumatic. That is the athlete that had nothing going on and has an injury where he has a bad ankle sprain because of the way he came down from a rebound… or if he gets elbowed in the nose and fractures his nose… That’s inevitable, really hard to prevent.



The most common injuries we see are the foot and ankle and then hand, and we do see a fair amount of facial injuries… I’m trained to evaluate those, and I have a very good understanding of those injuries, but I also have a team of consultants. We have a hand consultant, we have a foot and ankle consultant, we have oral surgery consultants and plastic surgeons who consult on facial fractures. We have orthotists that we use who make those masks that you see the players in. It’s all this stuff that happens behind the scenes.”