The Sports Docs Podcast
Sports medicine is a constantly evolving field, with hundreds of new articles published each month on the topic. This ever-growing wealth of information can make it challenging to stay updated on the newest approaches and techniques, and to know which data should actually change your practice. Join orthopedic surgeons, Dr. Catherine Logan and Dr. Ashley Bassett, as they chat about the most recent developments in sports medicine and dissect through all the noise.
On each episode of The Sports Docs podcast, the hosts will tackle a specific injury – from ACL tears to shoulder instability – and review the top research from various high-impact journals that month, including The American Journal of Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery, Sports Health, Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons, and more. The Sports Docs will also be joined by experts in the field of sports medicine – orthopedic surgeons, nonoperative sports medicine specialists, athletes, physical therapists, athletic trainers and others – to provide a fresh and well-rounded perspective based on their unique experiences.
The Sports Docs – Dr. Logan & Dr. Bassett – are friends & former co-residents from the Harvard Combined Orthopaedic Residency Program, who went onto esteemed sports medicine fellowships at The Steadman Clinic and The Rothman Institute, respectively. Dr. Logan practices in Denver, CO, and serves as Team Physician for Men's USA Lacrosse & as a Team Physician for U.S. Ski & Snowboard. Dr. Bassett is the director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Center at the Orthopedic Institute of New Jersey and practices across northern NJ, primarily in Morris and Sussex Counties.
Together, they will bring monthly conversations on how to care for athletes of all ages and levels of play, with a healthy mix of cutting-edge science and real-world application.
The Sports Docs Podcast
27. Overtime: Return to Play Following Bankart Repair
We’re excited to be in the studio today recording this episode on returning to play after arthroscopic stabilization for anterior shoulder instability. Now, we did a whole episode on shoulder instability back in March of 2021 with Dr. Mark Price – shoulder surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and team physician for the New England Patriots.
We discussed a lot on that two-part episode, including anterior and posterior instability, nonoperative and surgical treatment, and different surgical approaches including arthroscopic versus open Bankart repair and bone block procedures. It was a great discussion, and we definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t listened to it already.
But today we’re narrowing our focus to post-op rehab and return to play testing after arthroscopic anterior shoulder stabilization. We’ve spoken about return to play testing a lot on previous episodes. We even did an entire episode with Dr. Robin West – team physician for the Washington Nationals and the Washington Commanders – dedicated to this very topic: returning athletes to play after various orthopedic injuries. In that episode we highlighted that there is often little to no data to guide safe return to sport after an orthopedic injury, particularly those treated surgically.
That is also case for athletes who undergo surgery for anterior shoulder instability. On today’s episode, we’re going to review an article titled “Functional Rehabilitation and Return to Play After Arthroscopic Surgical Stabilization for Anterior Shoulder Instability” published in the December 2021 issue of Sports Health. In this case series, Dr. Brian Busconi and colleagues at UMass evaluated 62 athletes who underwent arthroscopic Bankart repair and were subsequently cleared to return to sports using both functional and psychological testing.
Before we dive into the results of this paper, it is worthwhile to review the traditional methods of clearing athletes after Bankart repair as there is currently no validated return to sport assessment for this particular surgery. Ciccotti and colleagues performed a systematic review of 58 studies assessing return to play criteria in a 2018 article published in Arthroscopy. Unsurprisingly, the most common criterion used to clear an athlete after arthroscopic Bankart repair was time. 75% of studies used time from surgery as the sole criterion, with the most commonly used time point being 6 months post-op. 19% used strength and 14% used range of motion. Only 1 of the studies evaluated proprioceptive control as a metric for guiding return to play.