The Killer B's: Joel Blank & Jeremy Branham
Dr. Jesse Morse with Expert Medical Opinion on How Kyle Tucker's Injury was Mishandled
(upbeat music) - You're locked in with a Killer B's on ESPN 97.5 and 92.5, live from the Veritex Community Bank Studios. Here's Joel Blanken, Jeremy Branden. - Be a joint now as we go out to the HR&P guest line by Dr. Jesse Morse, health and wellness of doctors, sports and family medicine. You can follow him at Dr. Jesse Morse or just head to theinjuryexperts.com. Dr. this is a really curious situation when it comes to one Kyle Tucker. Foul the pitch off his shin on June 3rd. You know, what a team gives us isn't always 100% accurate and certainly wasn't the case when it comes to the Houston Astros. They're saying he's nearing his return in the next coming days to three plus months with no Kyle Tucker playing in baseball games. And your expert opinion, what is your best prognosis of what happened with Kyle Tucker? - Yeah, so that's an interesting situation 'cause when I saw it, usually when guys follow a ball off the shin or their foot or whatever, couple of days they have an annoying bone bruise and then they come back. When you know your shin, if anybody's ever banged your shin, it's very painful, very tender. But you don't really think of it much more than that. You can have shin splints, which are what we call an ill stress syndrome, which is basically like little stress fractures in the front of the tibia. But that you do from like a lot of running or running on a long surface, it's not really applicable here. That is really thinking it's an oven. Tucker's, you know, the elite from many years, very high profile, I'm not really worried about him getting shin splints. But then he just doesn't return and I'm like, well, what are we missing here? Like, something's not consistent with their story. If he was my patient, I would have probably initially did an MRI and then it would ultrasound them. And then if something wasn't right, which it wasn't asked for about two, three weeks, I would have probably got a CAT scan here, which is not traditional in orthopedics, but with people with weird fractures when you're looking for things that aren't making sense, you can see things that you're not gonna catch on an MRI or an ultrasound. And it sounds like he had a fracture of kind of the posterior or deep part of the tibia that they didn't catch on the initial imaging that was just initially ruled a really bad bone groups, which is exactly what it sounds like. And the problem is he should have a non-weight bearing for probably a month if not longer, depending on, you know, where it was at and what they were doing to complement the rehab life. But I don't think he did that. So every time he kind of walked on it, he's stressing this more, and that's why it likely took so long to come back and heal. - Well, that's what I was gonna ask you, Doc, because of the fact that we heard shortly after the initial second bone bruise that he was on the treadmill and having worked in sports long enough to realize they had these non-weight bearing treadmills that we've talked about on the show, where at the very worst case scenario, you don't want him pounding on the leg, even if you still wanna try and keep his cardio up, if he's gonna try and come back. I just, it's unfathomable to me that they would have prescribed, even if there was any slight concern or the possibility that they would put him right onto a treadmill. - Yeah, I mean, you're talking about an anti-gravity treadmill. There's a couple of different versions of it. There's an underwater one that some people use for buoyancy reasons. But yeah, I mean, you don't get onto that until you're like, in your rehab, like you don't do that initially. That takes time to graduate too. So I think it was a combination of when the initial evaluation, they didn't feed the fracture. And then a lot of the times the player is kind of on his own or just with the rehab, people are kind of on their own. And he doesn't check in with the doctors a lot. So he probably wasn't making the progress that they wanted. And then by the time they finally figured out there was a fracture, it was way later than they had liked. So it's unfortunate because I think this was properly addressed and if it was identified initially, I think he probably could have been back about a month ago. - Wow. Dr. Jesse Morse joining us on the HRNP guest line. The timeline's what's weird about this too, because no one's given you the date on like when they discovered the suspected fracture. Like is it something that possibly could have developed later? Is it possible that it could have become a stress fracture because they were being too strenuous on a leg that was damaged with a severe bone bruise. We know that it happened June 3rd. We know that he was on crutches for a few days. And it seemed like they were kind of adamant to get him off of crutches. We knew that he was in a walking boot for a couple of days and then took that off. We know three weeks later, he was on a treadmill. And then Kyle Tucker the other day earlier this week after a little bit of time and continued imaging and stuff after the swelling and everything kind of calmed down, it was revealed there was a little fracture in the shin. Dana Brown, the general manager of the Astro said on Wednesday that they, the suspected fracture was on the back of the bone. Like how does any of this add up? - Yeah, it's just a unique situation because, I mean, you have a high profile guy. It's not like you're talking about a single A guy or something. And the, you know, with the instance in medicine, it's not hard to just go get another scan and say, "Hey, are we missing something?" Have a different radiologist. And say, "Hey, do you see anything that this one didn't see?" And then does the pain correlate with what his initial diagnosis was? You know, my practice is in Miami, it's a bit of an unorthodox surgery. I couldn't even do stem cells and PRP and non-surgical, you know, whole comprehensive care. So I have my fair share of professional applications. And if I saw this personally, I would have said, "Well, this pain doesn't correlate "or if the therapist was telling me, "Hey, she's in a lot of pain. "This doesn't really correlate with a bone bruise." Then you start digging a little bit more and you say, "Hey, what are we missing here?" And that's when you start looking deeper and if there was a stress fracture either as a result of the initial injury and then it just exacerbated it or if it was there the whole time, you know, we don't know. But that's the tricky part. And I don't know what modality they use. I don't know if they put them in hyperbaric chamber, if they're doing any hydrostatic mentee, if they're doing any PRP or any stem cells near the joint or near the area, if they're doing any something called PMF. Like there's a lot of different moving parts that I use in my practice that a lot of the teams sometimes use you sometimes don't. That could have amplified his healing. And I don't know, I don't, we don't, David, tell us what he was doing and not doing. But the question is like, how did this get missed? 'Cause he could have been, his back could have been used, his glove was important. And how you missed, you know, almost about half the season. And thankfully they're doing well. So, you know, it's a little bit of a moot point, but nonetheless, just unfortunate. - What Jeremy mentioned is also something that almost kind of incriminates the organization to a degree, in my opinion, I'm curious what you think. But when they initially said everything that they said, and then we saw from replays that there were two impactful swinging bat to a ball, which created the impact on the front of the shin. And we know that's a very, as you mentioned, a very thin area where they said the swelling was too great to see anything at the time. But if the fracture indeed was on the back of the bone, does that not indicate that that probably came from something other than the ball hitting the front of the shin? - Yeah, it could have, or, you know, that's a super rare location. The caveat is really hard to fracture. I mean, very, very, very difficult to fracture. The fibula, the small bone on the outside, the lateral side of the leg is very easy to fracture, but that's not really a deal. The tibia is hard to fracture. I mean, this car accident's like, you know, fracture dislocations of the ankle, like crazy traumas. Like, it's pretty, you know, I find it a little hard to believe that he would do that following the ball up his leg, obviously, if he did, then the velocity and the angle just had to be perfect. You know, and even then, like, what's the harm in spending another $300 or whatever it is to get another MRI in a week or 10 days, or whatnot, and say, hey, is this the same? Is it healing? Is it not healing? You know, bone verses can technically show up and continue to show up for a year and a half on an MRI? That doesn't mean they're painful the whole time, but we have data to support that. The question is, how often did they reimage him? Did they just shut him down and say, hey, we'll check everything or whatever? But, you know, I hope they, you, them and whoever else is paying attention to this is a learning situation so that you could prevent it from hypothetically happening again. - Well, that's a lot of information to take in. Dr. Jesse Morris, thank you for your insight on that. And I'm not sure we have more answers, but certainly have more of a medical opinion of what took place with Kyle Tucker. We appreciate the time. - My pleasure. - You got it. Dr. Jesse Morris, you can follow him on Twitter. Dr. Jesse Morris has his own health and wellness, sports and family medicine practice, and you can visit him online, theinjuryexpertts.com. The most damning thing to me, he should have been non-weightbearing for a while. - I got that. - We know that he was non-weightbearing for like two days. They were like, get off of crutches, get out of the, he was, he was celebrating a walk-off within a week of June 3rd. Like probably, I'll have to go back and look at the date, but he was early to mid-June. He was walking out of the dugout, limping out of the dugout to go celebrate a walk-off victory, when Dr. Jesse Morris should have said he should have been non-weightbearing. - We know that he was on a treadmill as Joel asked about on June 28th, which is 25. - No later than June 28th. - Yeah, no later. So at most 25 days removed from the initial injury, so also less than the month of a weight bearing. - The? - I mean, if the doctor said like, if they'd done things correctly, he could have been back a month ago. - And look, Dana Brown could have been lying to us about the suspected fracture, but he said the suspected fracture was on the back of the bone. - Sure did. - Like that is, like that is what? Like what? Like let's talk to Jeremiah Randall, they'll never let us do that, but what? How was the suspected fracture on the back of it when Dr. Jesse Morris said that that is a hard bone to break? And then secondly, when did you suspect a fracture? I need to know that. And then third, why in the world did you have him off of crutches as quickly as you did than running on a treadmill within three-ish weeks? - Yeah, what's more important, what, you know, how you're perceived and what you look like from what you were putting out to what actually happened, or just the overall healthier player to make sure that this doesn't happen for as long a time as it's already happened. Like don't worry about the fact if you first incorrectly diagnosed or said what you thought it was and that you thought he could come back, but don't exacerbate it by then getting them off of crutches as quick as you can, putting them on a treadmill and setting yourself up for three months. - It'd be easy to, like, you guys have talked about your own stories about having, you know, problems that going back, hey, they're still paying. It'd been so easy to say like, hey, he's not feeling right. We did additional testing. We found this, you know, we found this to be an additional injury. It's gonna be out longer than we initially expected. No, it wouldn't have been up in arms about that. - And then he mentioned that-- - It wouldn't have been so easy. - We spent the extra 300 bucks. You got a sponsorship with a hospital and you got team doctors. I'm pretty sure they ain't worried about that. Just exhaust every possible resource to diagnose it as accurately as you can. - And like, we don't know everything that happened. Like, we will never be privy to that because they will never give us that information. But this screams gross ignorance and/or gross incompetence. Quite frankly, quite in as simple as they had him on his feet when he should have been not weight-bearing for weeks. 6207, Houston's one of the best medical cities in the world. It is crazy if the Astros don't have the best medical team in the league. How about just like an average one? Like, and Kyle Tucker's not the first example of medical, like the medical team coming into play here. How about the return to play policies with Penn Murphy? How about the return to play policy with Luis Garcia? How about the return to play policy with Christian Javier who had a strained neck and then two starts later needs Tommy John? We could go, I mean, I like to keep Lance McCullers out of this conversation 'cause I feel like that's an entirely different animal than comparing it to all of the others. You had been Verlander, Justin Verlander's brother on Twitter and having a podcast about how the Astros sports medicine staff are clowns or hacks. Like, he wouldn't have done that if Justin Verlander was like, hey, yeah, don't do that, don't do that. - Yeah, no, there's too much there. And I didn't know all of the docs background and we were running out of time. But I was gonna say, can you explain the correlation between sleep and pillows and rotator cuffs and gremlins? 'Cause that would have been something that I would like someone with a medical background to say was even a possibility. - Yeah, not great. Just for my peace of mind, can we please hire a new sports medicine staff for the peace of mind of this fine city?