Ep. 216: The Emotional Impact of Youth Sports Injuries

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Carol Vassar (0:12)

Each week, we'll be joined by innovators and experts from around the world, exploring anything and everything related to the 85% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor's office. I'm your host, Carol Vassar. And now that you're here, let's go.

We're at Hot Topics & Pediatrics in Orlando, Florida. I'm Carol Vassar. With me right now is Dr. Stephanie Pearce. Dr. Pearce is a sports medicine specialist and a team physician to the US. Olympic Ski Team. Your specialty is halfpipe, right?

Stephanie Pearce (0:50)

Yep, snowboard halfpipe.

Carol Vassar (0:51)

Well, welcome to the podcast today, Dr. Pearce. I want to talk about, we talk often about the injuries that kids involved with sports will experience.

I want to talk more about the mental health side of that and talk about the injuries with regard to how it affects kids and the way they think, the way they think about themselves. What happens psychologically to a young athlete when they have a serious injury, an ACL or a shoulder injury or something else that might affect them for the rest of their lives?

Stephanie Pearce (1:24)

Carol, that's a great question. So certainly there is the physical aspects of having the injury and kind of getting over the pain. And we'll take ACL for an example. It's a beautiful, beautiful kind of situation and look on the whole perspective. So an ACL injury usually hurts in the first few days and it starts to feel better, but they don't have a functional knee.

And that adds to some of the mental component, adds to some of the confusion, right? So usually when you have a knee injury or any kind of injury, you expect that once it starts to feel better, that it's getting better and that's not the case for a ligamentous injury. And so once you recover from the acute period, then you start having some continued significant instability anytime you're kind of turning and pivoting, even with walking, doing normal activities of daily living. And so that starts adding into the beginning part of this mental piece, which is very frustrating. The other piece of the mental component, especially with ACL, is everyone knows that, oh, an ACL injury, right? Something that I may not know exactly what that means, but I know that it's bad and I know it's significant. And it's usually about a year recovery. And so a year recovery, especially for our adolescent athletes, seems like an eternity. And so kind of having that black hole or that black futuristic perspective of not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, very, very difficult. So many of these athletes, as they're coming through this, they come in, we kind of go through the full dabda, right? The depression, the anger, the bargaining, the denial, and then finally the acceptance.

Carol Vassar (2:53)

It's grief.

Stephanie Pearce (2:54)

It's grief. Exactly. And so as they're going through a difficult diagnosis, you have to kind of pass with them through those grief stages.

And with that, having a team around you really helps to do that. But ultimately, I like to help let them know, I come along with them, we show the empathy, we show that we can gain trust, things like that. And then as we're moving through, I start showing these are the steps. We have actual steps that through this process and this protocol that have worked time and time again, it will work for them. And then that way we can kind of move forward to get them back to the field. And I like to give them a little bit more of the focus is we're not just getting back to the field, or we're not just getting back to the court or back to the snow or whatever it may be. We're actually going to try and get them back to better than where they were.

So that way, we don't end up here again, right?

Carol Vassar (3:45)

Yet in the moment, we're talking about adolescents, mostly in this instance right now.

They're thinking, Oh my goodness, my future has disappeared. And that is the denial, the anger. That's the grief that they're dealing with. What is the role of the sports physician in that and all of that and bringing that team together?

Stephanie Pearce (4:08)

Absolutely. So I think, I kind of think about almost kind of like a quarterback. So we're the quarterback of this athlete's treatment.

We're the quarterback of this new adventure, if you will, to get from beginning to end into a better happy ending. And so with that, I recruit in some of my great friends and some of my colleagues and other specialties. So sports psychology is really, really important. I think sports dietetics is a really important piece of that too. So bringing in a nutritionist or ideally a dietician that can help go into the whole aspect of what fuel sources are we going to need in these various stages as we get through that. The sports psychology piece is critical. So ACLs is actually where we piloted our first program, and that's with the initial diagnosis. We get an initial evaluation with our sports psychologists. We do this a lot with the US. Ski and Snowboard Team as well.