McCargo's back ... (UPDATED)

[Pyrite Gal]

This is an excellent post. It is very strange that this was found now. People do not get "routine" MRIs of the spine unless they are having symptoms. You cannot see a disc herniation on plain x-ray and CT. The reason routine MRIs are not done, as Promo points out, is that a lot of us would have disc herniations. They mean nothing unless they are cause symptoms; pin/needle in legs, urinary/bowel incontinence, lower extremity weakness, or radiculopathy (shooting pains down legs due to herniation pressing against a lower extremity nerve).

 

Therefore, there must have been some symptom(s) he was having. He reports the symptom to the Colts, then they get an MRI, then he is sent back here. Why didn't the Bills know about this? Either he was hiding the symptoms from Bills or the Bills knew about it and have already done their own MRI. Or, this is all smoke screen and there is something totally different wrong.

 

Either way, its hard to tell if the herniated disc is really having a huge impact on his play. If it was, he could have easily had this surgically corrected. And even without surgery, depending on the severity, most of these injuries tend to self-resolve over weeks to months. As Promo points out, it's not his back, it's his heart.

Not all MRIs are the same and perhaps they got one quickly done (or more likely someone looked at one already done) and a new diagnosis emerged. For example, I remember hearing about an MRI technique called "gating" (or something like that) where the MRI is put in sync with an EKG readout and the images are taken between heartbeats. In some cases, the heart action creates enough turbulence that fairly small intrusions of the bulging disc onto a nerve cannot be seen and by doing a gating MRI a resolution emerges where a bone spur or some other small intrusion which might cause a lot of pain is rendered visible.

 

A treatment for this type of problem may be extended traction or quite invasive surgery (if the bone spur is high enough the best surgical route may even be through the mouth.

 

At any rate, fairly straightforward but beyond the norm diagnostic techniques can reveal problems which were reasonably missed by other docs.

[2003Contenders]

I still wonder if Polian didn't have some sort of buyer's remorse and begged the medical staff to find something -- anything -- that could conceivably justify McCargo failing a physical.

[In-A-Gadda-Levitre]

This is an excellent post. It is very strange that this was found now. People do not get "routine" MRIs of the spine unless they are having symptoms. You cannot see a disc herniation on plain x-ray and CT. The reason routine MRIs are not done, as Promo points out, is that a lot of us would have disc herniations. They mean nothing unless they are cause symptoms; pin/needle in legs, urinary/bowel incontinence, lower extremity weakness, or radiculopathy (shooting pains down legs due to herniation pressing against a lower extremity nerve).

 

Therefore, there must have been some symptom(s) he was having. He reports the symptom to the Colts, then they get an MRI, then he is sent back here. Why didn't the Bills know about this? Either he was hiding the symptoms from Bills or the Bills knew about it and have already done their own MRI. Or, this is all smoke screen and there is something totally different wrong.

 

Either way, its hard to tell if the herniated disc is really having a huge impact on his play. If it was, he could have easily had this surgically corrected. And even without surgery, depending on the severity, most of these injuries tend to self-resolve over weeks to months. As Promo points out, it's not his back, it's his heart.

there is a clear difference between a bulging disc and a herniated disc, here's an example from the Mayo Clinic

 

My ex wife had a bulging disc and it didn't show up on an x-ray or cat scan, it wasn't until she had an MRI that it was visible to an orthopedic surgeon. As the article says, bulging discs aren't always painful, so until we learn otherwise, the Bills medical staff and JMC get a pass on knowing about preexisting conditions