Quote ="saint at wire"Calm down a bit won't you.
Without anyone being an expert on here, intuition and not anything else leads one to think that if you have any injury or disease, you are more likely for it to re-occur unfortunately.
Even if you ignore heart attacks, cancer, strokes etc (which are more like to occur after suffering from one of these than if you have never had had one of these); it is surely more likely that if you have a major physical injury either as a result of the injury or alternatively you were already "prone" to such an injury, you are then more like to be injury prone.
My brother in law has had all sorts of work done on his knee and his surgeon from Broadgreen who is apparently a leading light in this sort of surgery advised him that no matter what he did, the knee would always be weaker because of muscle compensatory action and wear from bone on bone interaction.
I'm not suggesting he had an identical injury to Sia but this is an indication of the body becoming weaker injury prone etc as a result of compensating for the inital injury and repair.
I've only done a bit of research but it would appear on the face of it that SaintsFan's fears have substance;
[urlhttp://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Citation/1977/07000/Acute_Dislocation_of_the_Patella__Results_of.7.aspx[/url
This debate is a bit like the search for WMD in Iraq; everyone knew that they didn't exist but you can't prove a negative. In the end, intuition was right. Were most people REALLY surprised when nothing was found? Will most people be really surprised if/when Sia has further problems? I REALLY hope I am wrong but I don't think so.'"
I have no idea where you are going with this WMD stuff, or how you managed to connect the dots between it and Soliola. Let's try to keep the boundaries of this debate within site of the horizon.
Instincts are great. They are one of the main reasons behind man's unique achievements as a species. Without instincts our distant ancestors would be haplessly blundering into the salivating jaws of lions, crocodiles and sharks (assuming sharks do salivate) instead of sewing oats that eventually lead to us. Instincts allow us to make decisions and function whilst being in possession of only a small subset of information. The universe is an insanely complex place and even if we could stuff all the known facts into that two pound lump of goo stuck between our ears we’d be so paralysed with indecision it would be impossible to function.
Instincts are the result of a kind of sub-conscious computation of experience rolled in with information we've assimilated (perhaps through reading, or watching TV) that resides in long-term memory but is not directly accessible. When we read a book we tend only to consciously recall certain key details or themes, but the brain stores far more information than we think. The problem is it tends to bury it deep beneath the line of consciousness and often these memory fragments only become available through a kind of memory-to-memory association. Which is why we occasionally receive so-called "flashes of inspiration", where information we thought we'd forgotten suddenly emerges out of nowhere into thinking.
Unfortunately, instincts are not always reliable. Memory is a flawed medium that leads to a recreation of past events (warped by our character, personality, attributes and so forth) rather than accurate representation - which means that whilst instincts remain a useful problem solving tool, they can only ever be a poor substitute for facts derived from statistical data - otherwise known as sciencey-type stuff.
Whenever I hear the word "intuition", or "surely" as an appeal to reason (often in conjunction with - my personal favourite - "common sense"icon_wink.gif alarm bells start going off. Instinctual reasoning is a bad basis for logical thinking. B.A.D.
Returning to the points you have raised:
1. What evidence - other than your own intuition - are you offering to support the assertion that any surgically repaired injury must always be weaker?
2. Personal experience or the experience of a family member amounts to one case. Would you be happy to take an experimental drug which has been found safe in a trial consisting of a single test case?
3. Unless your BiL is incredibly well off it is simply not possible to compare the treatment he received with that afforded to professional athletes. The latter receive bleeding edge (and sometimes highly-experimental) treatment and rehabilitation that is several levels above the type offered by all but the most exclusive private healthcare plans. Professional athletes also benefit (greatly) from recuperating without the kind of employment/income stresses mere mortals such as us endure.
4. It goes without saying the body is an incredibly complex interconnected system of organs, muscles, bones, tissue etc. Given this complexity it is not feasible for any one surgeon to understand the anatomical and physiological nature of the entire body, which is why they branch into specialisation - general, neuro, cardio-thoracic etc. It is similarly unfeasible to argue (without any firm basis that I can see) that just because a particular body part behaves in such fashion after treatment it automatically follows that ALL body parts follow suit. It's like arguing that just because a damaged liver is capable of repairing itself, it automatically follows that if I chop off my finger it will grow back.
5. What do you mean by saying "injury prone"? How do you begin defining an injury prone player? I suppose you could start by saying something like "a player who suffers from injury repeatedly". But how do you know his teammate wouldn't suffer precisely the same injuries had he been put in his place? How do you know he wouldn't have suffered MORE injuries? What about a player who suffers a repeat of the same injury. Would you argue that that injury was "prone" to happen again? If so - how do you know the circumstances that caused that injury would not have induced the same injury in a player free of such prior injury? After all, a joint - whether it be repaired or not - can only tolerate a certain amount of force before it fails. Isn't it logically faulty to declare a player injury prone despite the fact that his knee was subjected to a degree of force that even the strongest of knees could not tolerate? You see how we're operating here under a veil of ignorance? Without facts, without evidence the whole notion of injury proneness is hopelessly defective.
