[FULL EPISODE] Talkin' Injuries w/ Dr. Nithin Natwa

**James Koh** (0:01)
We've got our Taycan is loaded and ready. Absolutely dominant on deep routes, absolutely dominant on short routes. The boys are backbanging. Excellent separation against ManCover.

**Nithin Natwa** (0:11)
This is Reception Perception The Show.

**James Koh** (0:15)
Yo, what's cracking everybody? James Koh, not Matt Harmon here with you today. Matt's out on vacation for the next couple of weeks. How dare Matt Harmon enjoy his life and go to Europe and just live his life that way? I don't understand it. I mean, this guy's got to be doing football all day every day. No, but no, instead, it is a roundtable of guests. But the first guest that we've got this week, it's going to be at Fantasy Docs, man. Maybe you've seen his stuff on Instagram or TikTok, but it's Dr. Nithin Natwa.
Nithin, man, we appreciate you jumping on.

**Nithin Natwa** (0:48)
Yeah. Thanks a lot, James. Really happy to be here. I think we got a good amount of players that are ready to run through.

**James Koh** (0:54)
Man, I'm so excited to talk to you because I'm getting a first-hand education on all this sports medicine stuff. But again, go follow my guy at Fantasy Docs. It does an unbelievable breakdown of players' injuries and what it means for the future. I want to start here in New York. It's Malik Nabers. Now, from what we understood, it's a knee injury. We're thinking, okay, he suffered it early enough that he should be back for 2026, good and go, like good and ready to go, like ready to rock it. But there's been so many complications. I feel like people are just, I know I am. I'm terrified of what Malik Nabers might look like in 2026

**Nithin Natwa** (1:34)
Yeah. Nabers is someone that the alarm bells were going off for a lot of people early on because he had about a month in between the injury and a surgery. But that's actually the one thing that wasn't super concerning because the time from ACL rupture isn't that big of a deal. What they're really doing is they're just trying to make sure he gets back his full range of motion. And in some people that takes less time, some people that takes more time. But that's the reason why they waited for a month and it doesn't indicate that he's going to have a worse outcome. The thing for me that really started kind of getting me worried is they had a video of him walking in one of the games in late December, early January. Well over, I think about two months after surgery and he was still wearing a pretty bulky brace and he was still using a cane to walk. And the thing about it is he tore his ACL, he had a meniscus tear as well. Even with those two things, by that time, most people are outside of the brace, they're not using a crutch, they're able to fully weight bear. So I was a little bit concerned then, but the process can be a little bit slow for some people.
Then they launched that he was having a repeat surgery, and repeat surgeries are usually not indicated. So it's not super abnormal that he had one, but it's just kind of all these things compounding together, and his just delay in every aspect of the recovery, that's making me get a little bit more concerned, along with the fact that they bulked up their wide receiver court significantly.
They drafted a wide receiver, I think, in the third round. They signed two one-year journeymen as well, and that's telling me that they're not looking for him to be ready by the start of the season.

**James Koh** (3:08)
Can you talk to me about, okay, so it's an ACL and meniscus.
Again, it's that combination, especially that word meniscus, that scares the bejesus out of me. You said initially that it didn't concern you all that much. But I know meniscus tears have a big, big range. It can be minor, it can be major. What were your thoughts here when you saw him in that big, bulky brace? You talked about the cane. Could that meniscus tear have been a little bit or a lot more significant than we originally thought?

**Nithin Natwa** (3:38)
The meniscus tear isn't so much my concern, although we saw Trey Venson last year. It seemed like he had a straightforward meniscus clipping and then he ended up missing the menisces and never came back. So yeah, there can be complications with the meniscus, but when they talk about that scar tissue removal, which is what they said the focus of the second surgery was, that makes me think that it was much more the ACL. The ACL is the reconstruction that's more commonly associated with scar tissue. And you don't have to remove scar tissue. Scar tissue is inevitably going to form to some degree in an ACL reconstruction. They decide to go in when it's, when he feels like he's having chronic pain out of proportion, or more importantly, the range of motion isn't getting back, indicating that there's possibly some scar tissue that's clogging up that joint right there. That's when they go in for that revision surgery. It is not something that's an absolute bad news thing.