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The use of local anaesthetic injections in professional football

J Orchard

South Sydney Sports Medicine 111 Anzac Parade Kensington NSW 2033 Australia johnorchard@msn.com.au

Key Words: local anaesthetic; professional football; pain

Local anaesthetic use in professional football is one of the greatest taboos in sports medicine. The subject is not covered comprehensively in any sports medicine textbook or review article. Most of the publications citing local anaesthetic use are legal cases from the National Football League (NFL) in which the procedure has been connected with a career ending injury.^{1, 2} There are some candid accounts of how commonplace local anaesthetic use is in the NFL,^{3, 4} and anecdotal evidence suggests that the situation is no different in professional football competitions elsewhere in the world. This includes professional rugby union, in which the practice is officially banned. I have previously published my personal statistics of local anaesthetic injections over a four year period with a professional Australian football team,^{5, 6} but cannot find any similar documentation from other doctors in the sports medicine literature. The attitude of most professional football doctors may be that this . . . [Full text of this article]

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