In the good old days, physicians routinely made house calls. The decision to visit the literal bedside of a patient was practical: hospital services were primitive and often offered too little benefit to justify an emergency journey by the patient. These physicians carried leather bags, sometimes called Gladstones, that were filled with instruments for eventualities…
Treating the Athlete: New Thoughts on How to Prevent & Treat Arthritis in Athletes & Raise Their Awareness
All athletes—amateur and professional—should understand their risks for developing injury-related arthritis. Rheumatologists and other physicians at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York take a rapid approach to treating athletes, often considering intense physical therapy, innovative treatments and surgery much sooner than for the average patient—all to keep joints healthy and enable athletes to play for as long as possible…
Rheumatologist Dr. Richard Meehan Discusses Tour of Medical Duty in Gulf War, Iraq War
Richard Meehan, MD, can still hear the distinctive sound of footsteps that would travel along a gravel path toward his wooden hut in the middle of the night in Iraq. “I’d hear somebody walk from the command post, either toward my hut or the operations officer who slept in the hut next to mine,” says…
Tendinitis & Other Weight Training-Related Injuries
With the increased popularity of CrossFit and other weight-training sports, a recent review examined the risk of injury associated with these activities. Using data from mostly retrospective studies, researchers determined that weight-training sports have a lower risk of injury than team sports, with bodybuilding having the lowest injury rate…
Running Barefoot May Protect Against Some Musculoskeletal Injuries
Running barefoot may conjure images of summer and childhood, but since Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia set a world record running barefoot in the marathon in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome (Olympic gold medal in a world-record 2:15:16.2), many runners have adopted the style. A recent study found that running barefoot may be associated with significantly fewer overall musculoskeletal injuries than running shod…
Treg Cells May Orchestrate Muscle Repair after Injury
New research shows the accumulation of regulatory T cells in damaged muscle corresponds with a switch in the myeloid cell infiltrate from a proinflammatory to a proregenerative phenotype.
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