Dr. Jung adds perspective to the Jazz’ young star’s ankle injury.
Article: Utah Jazz: Surgeon talks about Taylor Hendricks’ injury – Deseret News
A fibula fracture and dislocated ankle is not a common basketball injury but the way that the injury happened to Utah Jazz second-year forward Taylor Hendricks is not something that is completely out of the ordinary.
Frankly, the way that it happened is something that we’ve all probably experienced. You’re walking along and for whatever reason you don’t pick up one of your feet quite enough and your toe skids across the ground. So much of the time when something like that happens, you catch yourself and trip up a little bit. Sometimes it’s a little more dramatic and you might trip and fall. That could sometimes lead to an ankle sprain.
But, if someone is running, and they’re dealing with a much larger frame than the average person and rather than catching themselves, all of their weight comes down onto their foot and ankle, well, that’s when you end up with a much, much worse injury.
In speaking with Kenneth Jung, MD, an orthopedic foot and ankle surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles and foot and ankle consultant to the Los Angeles Lakers, he told me to imagine that the foot operates as a dial relative to the lower leg, while all being tightly connected. When Hendricks landed, quite a few things happened all at once. His foot was turned along that dial, tightening everything and pulling, and with the addition of his body weight coming down on his leg, that led to not only a broken bone but also ligament damage.
“As you twist that dial relative to your lower leg, you’re either gonna break a bone or tear a ligament,” Jung said. “And the more you do, the chances of it being unstable or dislocating increases. So obviously, he’s a big guy. It’s the amount of the amount of force that he lands with.”
“To get a dislocation, that means things were torn, ligament wise,” he said. “The goal of surgery is to restore the stability and the alignment of all the bones in the joint in order for the ligaments to heal properly. Sometimes you’ll actually put sutures into the ligaments to pair them together, or you put sutures into the bone to restore that alignment, but all those would be addressed at the same time.”
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