injuryupdate
27-09-2003, 02:48 PM
The Brisbane Lions have revealed the secret behind Michael Voss' miraculous recovery during the finals from a knee injury - not a new treatment which speeds up recovery, but an old treatment which simply takes away pain. Voss had local anaesthetic used to block pain around his knee joint after MRI scans revealed no major structural damage. Read more at AFL.com. At this time of the year, there are probably a handful of players in every team receiving 'jabs' to play in the finals. For example, it was reported that the Newcastle Knights gave injections to Ben Kennedy, Robbie O'Davis and Kurt Gidley in the first week of the NRL finals. Most injections, particularly during the season, are for A/C joint, rib and finger injuries, which are conditions that are generally self-limiting and will recover over the off-season. Where the Voss injection is controversial is that the knee is usually a no-go zone for local anaesthetic because of the risk of long-term damage to the most important joint in a footballers' body. Coach Leigh Matthews thought it was worth the risk and neutral views have also generally been favourable. On Fox Footy's League Teams, ex-players John Barnes and Russell Greene both were blasé about local injections, having no ethical problems and believing every team would be using them at this time of the season, whereas Mike Sheahan felt that eventually the injections would be banned by the AFL due to fears about long-term damage. Team medical staff will have their own guidelines (which areas are generally 'safe' to inject) and then their guidelines on when to break their own rules (two weeks out from the Grand Final when your most important player can't get on the field without painkillers). The downside of attempting to play with local anaesthetic affected Penrith hooker Luke Priddis, who tried to pass a fitness test for a rib cartilage injury in week 1 of the finals. Priddis had a medical procedure (almost certainly an attempted local block) on the Friday before the first final and suffered a collapsed lung as a side effect of the procedure. Whilst this sounds extreme, from a football viewpoint, the complication is minor as he missed the week 1 game that he would have been unfit for without local anaesthetic, and he will probably be fit for the Panthers' following match in week 3.