Returning to MMA after complex spinal fusion
As a fellowship-trained orthopedic spinal surgeon with over a decade of experience, I know a thing or two about a thing or two. And clearing a professional contact athlete to return to full competition is one of the most difficult, publicly scrutinized decisions that I will ever make.
Highly compensated professional athletes live and work under a different set of rules than normal humans (no surprise there). There expectations can be quite lofty and at times unreasonable. But in many instances, their potential rewards are hard to fathom by mere mortals. Consequently, the seemingly unreasonable comes into play with stunning regularity.
Our experience with contact athletes returning to play after complex lower back (lumbar) fusions is almost exclusively derived from football. Therefore, extrapolating this experience or available medical literature to an MMA athlete is a reach to put it mildly.
Let me put it another way. There is pitifully little experience and no good medical literature that is readily available to evaluate or determine when and if it's safe to return a MMA athlete to full contact. No biomechanical tests have been reported. No clinical papers have been published. It's truly uncharted waters.
A few very well known MMA athletes have recently or are contemplating a return, to full speed, full contact training and eventually competition. At some point, their surgeon is going to be forced to make the call. At some point, some state athletic commission somewhere is going to receive that application.
Unfortunately in medicine and especially spine surgery, if you make the right call 10,000 times in a row...no one cares.
If you make the wrong call, just once, with a professional athlete...Believe me you're toast...and the athlete is even worse off than you.
Highly compensated professional athletes live and work under a different set of rules than normal humans (no surprise there). There expectations can be quite lofty and at times unreasonable. But in many instances, their potential rewards are hard to fathom by mere mortals. Consequently, the seemingly unreasonable comes into play with stunning regularity.
Our experience with contact athletes returning to play after complex lower back (lumbar) fusions is almost exclusively derived from football. Therefore, extrapolating this experience or available medical literature to an MMA athlete is a reach to put it mildly.
Let me put it another way. There is pitifully little experience and no good medical literature that is readily available to evaluate or determine when and if it's safe to return a MMA athlete to full contact. No biomechanical tests have been reported. No clinical papers have been published. It's truly uncharted waters.
A few very well known MMA athletes have recently or are contemplating a return, to full speed, full contact training and eventually competition. At some point, their surgeon is going to be forced to make the call. At some point, some state athletic commission somewhere is going to receive that application.
Unfortunately in medicine and especially spine surgery, if you make the right call 10,000 times in a row...no one cares.
If you make the wrong call, just once, with a professional athlete...Believe me you're toast...and the athlete is even worse off than you.
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