Another visit
Heading to visit an Orthopedist today. After a lot of thought, some reading and a talk with a doctor friend I am going to seek a second opinion on treatment.
My Achilles area feels good. No pain like I experienced in the few weeks after tearing my gastroc and I think this in part is what is driving me to seek our more medical advice. I’m walking fine. I took batting practice the other day and had no pain. Maybe it’s a false sense of security.
I’ve been told that the doctor I am seeing doesn’t perform surgery on the Achilles. This came from the person I scheduled the appointment with. I had no idea, I was just going off a referral from my doctor friend. I don’t think he knew either but he holds him in high regard.
The scheduler said something to the effect that there are studies out that indicate the non surgical option is as good an alternative.
We’ll see what he thinks.
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Adrian, I’m a huge fan of the non-op approach in general, and I agree with that scheduler — and the study I linked to on your last page has the data to support the claim. My own fancy sports-med surgeon actually stopped doing ATR repairs after talking to the authors of that study. (He told me “I didn’t become a surgeon to do surgery with no benefit!”)
But if you’re 5 weeks after your ATR, I’m afraid that ship has sailed, and surgery’s now a better option. It may have been better for your leg in any case, given your long history of AT problems, which might be fixable “hands-on”.
The thing about the 5-wk delay is that the “magic” self-healing that drives the non-op cure — and that’s responsible for most of the strength of the surgical cure, too — comes from the body’s response to trauma, which only lasts so long. With surgery, a lot of that trauma comes from the surgery itself, but with the non-op approach, it’s all got to come from the rupture.
That “UWO” study (like most ATR studies) disqualified anybody whose ATR was more than 2 weeks old, and I bet most of them were more like a day or two old.
I’ve asked one of the authors if they could examine the data to see if there’s a correlation between “how fresh the ATR” and “how good the clinical results”, but I don’t think anybody’s jumping at the chance. I mean to e-mail the other authors, too, now that all their e-mails are listed online. I bet the results of the non-op cure deteriorate with even a week’s delay, though nobody’s ever tested that hypothesis, AFAIK. They’ve got the data already, so it would be easy to “mine” it to find out. One more study for the CV, especially if there IS a correlation. . .
OTOH, if you really had a calf-muscle tear rather than an ATR. . . I’d definitely get a few opinions from real doctors!
Adrian, fingers crossed it’s a calf tear and not an ATR!