Quote:
Originally Posted by Cali Flames Fan
Any kind of spinal degeneration at 29 is a big deal. Pretty hard to do that unless you are completely abusing your spine on a regular basis.
Degeneration is a bit of a generic term. If it's run of the mill osteoarthritis due to wear and tear, then there's no way it should keep him from playing. If it's disc degeneration then it's likely impinging on his spinal cord and causing all kinds of motor and sensation problems in his legs. Cox flexion/distraction therapy or spinal decompression is all you can do to manage it conservatively, and it takes a long time to recover. Failing that, laminectomy and fusion is necessary and he may never be cleared to play a rough contact sport like hockey after that.
Still, if Gary Roberts can come back and have a long career after a surgery like that, then Horton should be able to as well. Best of luck to him.
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Several things wrong with this. First off, the article is very vague and just states "degeneration". Take imaging of anyone's back over the age of 20 and they have degeneration in their lower back. That doesn't mean it's causing pain and not normal.
Osteoarthritis and degenerative disc disease are essentially the same thing. Everyone undergoes an aging & wearing process of the discs, just like everything else in the body. The reason I say they're "the same" is because as we lose disc height/viscosity/etc, we begin to have more movement at that joint, which causes osteophyte formation as an adaptive response. "Osteoarthritis" is the wearing of cartilage. In the case of the spine, that's the discs.
We all have degeneration. We don't all have pain. And only a small portion of those
with pain (even if we could reliably say it's 100%
from the degenerative disc disease, which we definitely can NOT) have nerve root impingement, "sciatica". This is
not the spinal cord.
There is WAY more treatment for conservative management than the things you listed. He will not have a laminectomy/fusion unless he is at the very end of the road.
I don't know anything about the injury other than the article. Just a few musings about your post, hope I didn't come across as confrontational, I just think anything that contributes to the fear of spinal pain should be addressed since it can be so crippling to an otherwise very benign injury.
(I don't know anything about Horton's injury specifically. Obviously his is bad enough to warrant this article but I guarantee it's not due to "degeneration").