20. OVERTIME: Achilles Tendon Injury

We are excited to back for 2022 and kicking off with an Overtime episode!

On today’s episode, we’re going to chat about treatment of Achilles tendon ruptures. We’ve seen this injury across many sports and in very prominent players – Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Brandon Brooks who tore both of his Achilles tendons one year apart. This can be a devastating injury for our athletes, so understanding the treatment options, post-op rehab and what return to sport looks like is very important.

We’ll start off with how to decide between non-op treatment and surgical repair and what those treatment protocols look like. Then, we’ll shift our focus to surgical treatment and compare standard open Achilles tendon repair to newer percutaneous repair techniques. After surgical repair, there is then a decision of traditional rehab versus accelerated rehab with early weightbearing. Lastly, we’ll finish up with a discussion on returning to sports after Achilles repair – how do we clear these athletes and how do they perform once they return to play?

We’re going to reference many articles from AJSM throughout our talk today. We’ll post the abstracts to our Instagram, which is thesportsdocspod – if you don’t already follow us you should! So if you’re interested in reading more about the individual studies you can find them there.