Richard Parker, MD, on comprehensive care for the Cavs
Advances in Sports Medicine have changed the game for pro athletes around the world, but especially for the 2016 NBA Champions, the Cleveland Cavaliers. Richard Parker, MD, Head Team Physician and President of Cleveland Clinic Hillcrest Hospital, discusses how comprehensive care – from nutrition to sleep medicine –enables pro athletes to perform at their highest levels.
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Dr. Parker says:
“The evolution of what we do today versus what we did 10, 15, 20 years ago Is just huge – the resources available, the level of understanding… That’s one of the reasons why I think we at Cleveland Clinic are set up so well to partner with the Cavaliers and any other professional teams that we work with because we have such unlimited resources.
For example, every one of our players every year go through a very exhaustive cardiovascular workup to ensure that they do not have any heart problems or aorta problems that can occur with particularly tall, big guys, so every year we partner with our cardiologists at Cleveland Clinic. They’re the experts in the field; other teams, other organizations reach out to them to get a second opinion on their athletes. We have that right at our fingertips…
Every year we add more and more. Just two days ago we met with the sleep [experts]. Analytics is so much bigger now. We have motion sensors… there’s information available that can predict when somebody’s starting to fatigue and get some rest, and the data is getting more sophisticated.”
Watch this video to learn from Dr. Parker’s perspective how advances in sports medicine have changed professional basketball. Watch Dr. Parker discuss practicing in a fishbowl here. He also discusses the impact of 82-game seasons on the prevalence of overuse injuries here.
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