Not since Bill Frist tried to diagnose Terri Schiavo via TV have we seen such an aggressive effort by doctors who have never treated a given patient to opine on his prognosis. But everyone wants to know when Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant will be back, and doctors who know nothing about his situation are in better position than non-doctors in the media who know nothing about his situation. So let’s have some doctors diagnose someone whose chart they’ve never seen.
But just because everyone wants to know when Dez will be back doesn’t make the application of a specific timetable the responsible thing to do. Which is why PFT Live on NBC Sports Radio relies exclusively on former NFL athletic trainer Mike Ryan, NBC’s Sports Medicine Analyst, to provide the audience a candid assessment regarding injuries.
As Mike Ryan said during Tuesday’s show, no one knows when Dez will be ready to go. The foot is a fairly important body part for any athlete who performs with, you know, his feet on the ground, and Bryant’s broken bone occurred in an area of the foot where blood circulation isn’t great. So it could take some time for the thing to heal.
Mike Ryan explained that the healing will be monitoring with periodic CT scans, and that a judgment eventually will be made as to whether Dez is 100 percent or close enough to 100 percent to play. There’s a chance the Cowboys will make a calculated risk to let him play before he’s 100 percent, but that would carry an enhanced risk of re-injury.
The uncertainty comes in the wake of the team’s decision to proclaim to the world -- even before surgery -- that Dez would miss 4-6 weeks. The problem with that declaration arises from the pressure it puts on the player to meet the timetable provided by the owner of the team.
So that’s the whole story. You can hear it for yourself by listening to Hour Two of Tuesday’s show. Or you can continue to demand certainty from doctors who will try to provide certainty even though they have no way of reliably obtaining it.