AFTER THE PROVINCIAL focus, the emphasis now shifts to the international.
Next weekend Ireland make their 2013 Six Nations bow and preparations will intensify this week.
For the management setup the box ticking began a while ago.
Team medic Dr Eanna Falvey may have bid farewell to the Irish players after the November internationals but has been closely observing their provincial exploits since then.
“We keep an eye on them all the time. The success of the team depends on their availability. We’d regularly be linking in with the provinces, we get great help from their setups as to how we manage players.
“The strength and conditioning coaches, the medics and the physios liaise very closely. They have to, it’s a professional sport.
“Guys want to be involved, they want to stay fit. And that’s especially true this year when playing well in the Six Nations could mean you go on to the Lions Tour.”
Rugby is not the extent of Falvey’s medical expertise being utilised in sport.
“I work with the Irish Amateur Boxing High Performance Unit as well. I’d have a boxing background and would have done a lot of that over the years.
“There’s been great efforts put in there and it’s a very professional setup. They’re a joy to be involved with.”
Falvey’s nine to five sees him based in Santry at the Sports Surgery Clinic, which recently established a 3D Biomechanics Assessment Laboratory at the facility.
It’s the first lab of it’s kind that is commercially available in the world and it is hoped will significantly help prevention and rehabilitation with groin-related injuries.
“The big issue with groin pain is the psychological impact of it,” says Falvey. “You don’t have crutches, you don’t have stitches, you don’t have a cast. There’s no endline in sight with groin pain.
“The traditional management of this injury was to make an MRI diagnosis and rest for six months. But what we quite often see is someone then comes back and in two or three months the pain comes back again
“The main problem is how you’re moving. What we’re doing is bringing people up to Santry to check their movement, see things like do their knees roll inward and are their hips stable.
“With that we can make a 3D marker and we’re able to look in slow motion as to how that motion is happening and measure the angles. We can then see what we need to target.
“Your chances of if not recurring are far higher if the way you’re moving that’s causing it is cut out. We’d be looking at an 8-12 week recovery with this new system rather than six months. It’s vastly accelerated.”
The facility can also assist with cruciate ligament injuries, which there have been a spate of in recent years particularly in GAA.
“The data from the States would be that if a man tears his cruciate, he’s six times more likely to tear it again than he would have been in the first place. They’re bloody high odds.
“So anything you can do to improve that is good. There’s no failsafe way. But this helps identify movement issues there as well.
“Recently there have been high-profile players tearing cruciates but it’s just a common injury. We’re just more aware of it now and there’s a lot more reporting of stuff now.
“We’re getting more inquisitive about injuries now as well.”
