When it comes to whether the Eagles properly handled the health care provided to Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts for his blood clots, the NFL is hardly a neutral, disinterested party. It was the NFL, through chief medical officer Allen Sills, that arranged for the evaluation of Hurts in London, which is part of what the league does to support all NFL teams that are imposed upon to play internationally.
On Tuesday, Sills spoke to reporters at the quarterly ownership meeting in New York. And he arguably protested too much when it comes to lingering concerns about the NFL’s culture regarding medical care for players.
“Any idea or any suggestion that a team physician is ever being influenced by a coach, a General Manager, a team owner — it just doesn’t happen,” Sills insisted. “There is no doctor who is taking orders from a football person, a non-medical person. Period.”
Setting aside whether he’s directly aware of how all 32 teams operate (he surely isn’t), in this context an express order isn’t needed. Team-hired doctors understand the assignment; the teams want players to be available to play. In nearly every case, the player wants to be available, too. Any doctor who develops a reputation in the building for being unnecessarily cautious when it comes to clearing a player to play will inevitably be replaced by a doctor who will.
And those assignments are very lucrative, both in what they pay to the doctor and in how they provide the doctor with built-in marketing for the rest of the doctor’s practice.
“The notion that there are external factors or that any of our physicians would put a player in harm’s way, that’s nonsense,” Sills said.
The dismissal of that possibility does not mesh with the facts. The mere existence of the Unaffiliated Neurotrauma Consultant program for diagnosing concussions and clearing players to return from concussions directly refutes Sills’s contention. If team doctors could be relied upon in every instance to set aside the unspoken (because it doesn’t need to be said) urgency to find that a potentially concussed player is good to go or to clear a concussed player to return, there would be NO NEED for doctors with no team affiliation.
As to most other health issues, the situation isn’t as critical. Orthopedic injuries don’t put a player at risk, and a shot or two of Toradol never hurt anyone, right? (Well, maybe not.)
In those rare instances where the shared desire for the team and the player to “be available” intersects with the player’s best interests as a patient, there’s inherent pressure on the team-hired doctor to get along by going along.
It’s unfortunate that Sills refused to recognize this basic fact. Hopefully, he said it for P.R. purposes and not because he truly believes it.
Finally, Sills invoked “patient privacy concerns” to justify not taking questions about the treatment Hurts received. That’s a copout. Hurts has already authorized the issuance of multiple statements that shared with the world various details about his private medical issues.
It’s easy to use “patient privacy concerns” as a shield when, in reality, the player quite possibly would authorize doctors to answer any and all questions about a situation that has already become extremely public. At this point, why would Hurts object to his doctors explaining what they did and why they did it?
Through it all, the NFL and the Eagles simply want to move on. All’s well that ends, as the late NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue liked to say. Hopefully, this one won’t end until all necessary questions are asked and answered — and until the NFL recognizes that, for certain health conditions, a UNC-style approach is needed.