Cavs Head Team Physician: On the Fishbowl and Fanatics (Video)

Champions. Elite athletes. Pro players. Ballers. The men of the 2016 NBA Champion Cleveland Cavaliers answer to many names, but Richard Parker, MD, Head Team Physician and President of Cleveland Clinic Hillcrest and Eastern Region Hospitals, simply calls them patients. Dr. Parker has spent many seasons as the Cavaliers Head Team Physician. Here, he discusses how working with a professional sports franchise differs from practicing in more traditional orthopaedic settings and why it’s always helpful to remember the origins of the word “fan.”

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Dr. Parker says:

“There’s a huge commitment of time, of communication, of checking your ego at the door and really doing what’s best for the player and for the athlete, not only in the given season but over the life of their career. You’re also practicing in a fishbowl, and we call it a fishbowl because everybody second guesses what you do. It’s in the sports page. It’s on talk radio. And as I always tell people, the word ‘fan’ came from ‘fanatic.’ It didn’t come from a person who understands all the variables and is making a sound decision. It’s really a cognitive decision to say ‘Okay, I’m going to step out of the office, out of the O.R. and into a fishbowl.’”

Watch Dr. Parker discuss macrotraumatic sports injuries here. He also discusses the impact of 82-game seasons on the prevalence of overuse injuries here. Watch this video to learn from Dr. Parker’s perspective how advances in sports medicine have changed professional basketball.