Hockey Confidential (4 page)

PRP is the legal (with a letter of consent from a sport's governing body and approval from the International Olympic Committee) injury-treatment process that involves taking blood from the injured athlete, spinning it in a centrifuge, taking the condensed elements of the centrifuged blood and reinjecting it into the injured athlete's precise muscle tear or tendon damage. It is not, when done as specified, considered to be blood doping or performance-enhancing.

“It's very effective,” Lindsay said. “It's legal so long as you're fixing a legitimate injury. There are growth factors in the platelets—it's basically a form of stem cell, but it's autologous. It's your own tissue—no drugs, no foreign substances. It causes protein synthesis, healing power. It can fix the injured area—it doesn't mask the thing like cortisone [does]. It works best for hamstring tears, Achilles tears and groin tears.

“You have to fix the lesion and then you need to fix the ‘system.' That's why Tony and I worked so well together. Tony would treat the specific injury and I'd work on the [body] system.”

But in 2009, Dr. Galea ran afoul of the law. His assistant was stopped at the U.S.–Canada border in Buffalo with a small quantity of human growth hormone (HGH), Actovegin (a derivative of calf's blood used to accelerate healing of injuries that isn't approved in Canada), and vials of foreign homeopathic drugs. Because all this happened not long after Galea was administering PRP injections to Tiger Woods, which was a matter of public record, it generated international headlines. PRP, when performed as specified, may be legal, but if, for example, HGH was added to the syringe cocktail, the process would cross the line into the realm of illegal performance enhancement. Galea claimed he had been using HGH on himself and other older, non-athletic patients.

Dr. Galea initially faced charges in both the United States and Canada relating to selling an unapproved drug, conspiring to import an unapproved drug, exporting a drug and smuggling goods into Canada. But in 2011, Galea pleaded guilty to a much lesser charge of illegally transporting “misbranded” drugs, including HGH. In 2012, Canadian authorities dropped all charges against Galea.

As of 2013, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, which regulates all doctors in the province, had never brought any charges against Galea and he continued to practise medicine in his Toronto clinic, with many professional athletes from all sports continuing to make their way to him for PRP treatments. But
The Globe and Mail
reported in the summer of 2013 that the College of Physicians and Surgeons had an open investigation concerning Galea, though no other details were provided.

“What can I say?” Lindsay said. “I treat athletes for injuries. I'm trying to heal them. It's all about healing, not cheating.”

Lindsay's wealth of experience has made him wise to the ways of the world, the highs and lows that are so much a part of athletics, but it's interesting that one of the people who had the greatest impact on Lindsay isn't an athlete at all.

Isadore (Izzy) Sharp is the octogenarian Canadian hotelier from Toronto, the founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. Getting to know a businessman like Sharp had as big an impact on Lindsay's approach to the “business” of healing.

“I tell this story all the time. I'm in Mr. Sharp's office and he's at the window. He says, ‘Come over here, I want to show you something. What do you see out there?' I said, ‘I dunno . . . traffic?'” Lindsay recounted, laughing. “He said, ‘Those people out there are too busy working to make money.' I didn't get it, so he told me: ‘You're providing a service, but you can't treat 100 people a day. Take your top 20 per cent of your clients and
really
look after them.'

“I'd never thought of it that way. The traditional thing for a chiropractor is you work in a clinic or an office and you adjust and treat as many people as you can in a day. I was obviously in a different situation. What [Sharp] said changed my life.”

Lindsay didn't work with only athletes. There were entertainers and captains of industry, too. The late tap dancer and actor Gregory Hines would regularly fly from Los Angeles to Toronto just to be treated by Lindsay.

But there's always going to be that phone call from an athlete or an agent, asking Lindsay for help. And some of his favourite clients and stories with the happiest endings come from those out-of-the-blue calls, where a young athlete is on hard times not only because of a specific injury but maybe due to messed-up biomechanics or a lack of strength and conditioning. Lindsay will assemble a team and apply his comprehensive approach.

“You need the right physical trainer, the right therapist, the right medical doctor . . . you need it all, a whole team of people, and you need it all working together in harmony,” Lindsay said. “That's how it's supposed to fit together, and when it all comes together like that, it's great.”

He's got lots of stories of like that. He just can't share them.

Mark Lindsay only played minor hockey to midget age as a
kid growing up in White Lake, and most of his first 10 years in the business didn't give him much involvement with hockey, but Gary Roberts ultimately changed all that, though in a somewhat circuitous fashion.

The Calgary Flames forward had to retire from the NHL in 1996 because of ongoing issues with his surgically repaired neck. He had nerve damage, bilateral stingers, and simply could no longer play the game at age 30.

Roberts's strength and conditioning coach, Lorne Goldenberg of Ottawa, called Lindsay to see if there were any unexplored treatment options for Roberts. Lindsay referred Goldenberg and Roberts to ART founder Michael Leahy in Colorado Springs. Leahy put Roberts back together. Roberts's soft tissue and neck flexors had all pinched around the nerve roots, causing the numbness and stingers. Leahy freed Roberts from the pain and numbness, Charles Poliquin rehabbed him on the strength and conditioning front and Roberts went on to play another 12 years in the NHL. It was a miraculous recovery and it was primarily due to ART. Roberts became fanatical about nutrition, training and treatment, so much so that he's become a highly respected strength and conditioning coach himself now, right there on the cutting edge of the industry and a huge advocate of ART science as an everyday part of the game.

“Mike Leahy and Gary Roberts created a revolution in hockey,” Lindsay said. “They brought ART to hockey.”

“ART, Mike Leahy and Mark Lindsay,” Roberts said. “Between them, they saved my career. It would have been over without them.”

When Roberts went from Carolina to Toronto in 2000, Lindsay began doing almost daily ART on the Maple Leaf winger, and it wasn't long before he was working on pretty much the whole team of that era—Mats Sundin, Joe Nieuwendyk, Bryan McCabe, Alex Mogilny, Tie Domi, Eddie Belfour and Curtis Joseph. With the blessing of the Leafs' medical and training staff—which is often unusual when it comes to the sometimes strained relationship between pro teams' staffs and outside chiropractors and/or practitioners of ART—Lindsay would go to the players' individual homes, often spending a full hour treating each. Lindsay estimates that in one calendar year alone, he probably laid hands on Roberts as many as 200 times.

“The real value of ART for me is prevention of injuries and freeing up athletes' bodies to be at their best,” Lindsay said. “At that time, with those Toronto guys, I didn't know of anyone using ART in a maintenance, preventative paradigm as opposed to specific injury treatment. When an athlete gets ART, he feels so much better, they're all freed up, everything feels more effortless, but they want to be treated all the time.”

It's almost addictive.

Yet treatments can be time-consuming—expensive, too, in many instances, because ART is most effective when it's done over and over again.

“It's worth every dollar,” Roberts said. “I think it's actually an undervalued investment. Sure, it cost me a lot of money, but not when you measure how much I spent on ART versus how much I made in the 12 years I played (after ART revived his career). It's a drop in the bucket. For a player today, I don't think there's any better investment.”

In some ways, it's actually surprising NHL teams don't employ full-time chiropractors whose specialize in ART, because if ever there were a sport tailor-made for the benefits of ART, it's hockey.

Skating, in and of itself (putting aside for the moment the potential for trauma), goes completely against normal human posture, which is upright and open. Skating causes a player to be hunched over and closed. Hockey players skate virtually every day, so the body becomes trained to be in a position that is anything but “normal.” The wear and tear of simply skating every day can break down an athletes' soft tissue. The same thing applies to off-season strength training for hockey players. Matt Nichol, a top strength and conditioning coach in Toronto, not only trains and conditions his hockey players all summer, he regularly has ART chiropractor Mike Prebeg and his staff on site to treat the athletes. It's foolish to think a high level of maintenance isn't required to keep a hockey player healthy and functioning optimally.

“It's like tuning a guitar—I don't know how else to explain it,” Lindsay said. “You tune a string, play it, tune it some more, play it some more. You never stop tuning or playing. If you don't ever tune the strings of that guitar, it won't play music like it's supposed to.”

Yet there are many times when an NHL club or player's first call to an ART chiropractor, if they make the call at all, is only to treat a specific injury or trauma. Yet it could very well be that the injury itself was a direct result of not using ART as preventive maintenance.

The human body is an amazing machine. The muscles and tendons are designed to fire in a very specific sequence. The action of one muscle triggers the action of another. When's it's unfolding as it should, it's like a beautiful symphony orchestra. But if there's just one instrument out of tune . . . simple wear and tear, or any traumatic incident—let's say, a blocked shot taken on the player's ankle—can set off an unnatural and potentially destructive deviated sequence for the athlete.

The ankle is sore, not broken or fractured—not anything that would prevent a hockey player from playing through the pain. But maybe that pain hinders the athlete—very subtly, without him even recognizing it—causing him to maybe not flex his ankle to the same degree he normally would. Suddenly, the muscle-firing sequence that starts in skating with the flexion of the ankle is “off” ever so slightly, and that alters every muscle movement up the leg and into the hips and core, which is where a hockey player ultimately derives his dynamic speed and power. When that sequence is off, it can cause muscles to break down or shut down, and one problem leads to another. Maybe two months after blocking a shot that didn't cause the player to miss so much as a shift, never mind a game, he's plagued with a hip problem or sports hernia that requires season-ending surgery. It all started because of a sore ankle.

“You learn the patterns of a sport when you treat its athletes,” Lindsay said. “Hockey is all about ankle flexion; you have to be able to dorsiflex. The degree of that flexion changes the action of your knee and hip, and then you can't activate your glutes, you get too far forward . . . when you have a joint that doesn't move right or soft tissue is tight, it's the equivalent of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that's when you get injured. ART is releasing everything so it can all go back into its normal sequence.”

Which is why, after treating hundreds of NHL players thousands of times, Lindsay says with dead certainty: an ankle sprain or other ankle injury, if not treated properly, leads to hip problems. Every time.

Every time?

“One hundred per cent,” Lindsay said.

One hundred per cent? Really?

“Non-negotiable, 100 per cent,” Lindsay said. “It's ankle, knee, hip . . . every time.”

And yet Lindsay is in the most demand when there's been an injury. It could be Sidney Crosby's high-ankle sprain, Steve Moore's neck trauma and post-concussion syndrome—you name it, Lindsay has likely experienced it with the more than 100 current NHLers he's treated. Sometimes the work is done with the blessing of the club's medical and training staffs; sometimes it's strictly hush-hush, on the side. There isn't a chiropractor practising ART who hasn't gone through that dance over territorial turf wars and issues of control.

Lindsay is convinced that “friction” between the disciplines—team doctors vs. team athletic therapists vs. outside chiropractors—isn't as prevalent as it once was, though it still most certainly exists. The fact that so many ex-NHL players who received ART during their playing days are now in management or coaching, he believes, should open more doors to outside treatment without conflict. Yet ART chiropractors will still tell you stories of NHL players sneaking off to see them because they fear their NHL club won't approve.

Lindsay said most of today's elite athletes, especially the new breed of young stars in the NHL, have already figured out the global approach to high performance and wellness. He notes the young guns in the NHL have assembled “teams” of experts running the gamut from strength training to nutrition, to power skating, to chiropractic treatments, to soft-tissue treatments, to medical treatments.

The evolution of his own career, Lindsay said, has been nothing short of amazing. ART started as a way for him to heal a specific injury to a specific piece of soft tissue, and then developed into overall injury prevention and wellness, but has gone to a whole new level as injuries in sports have become more complex and complicated.

Professional sports' modern-day plague—concussions—has absorbed a huge amount of Lindsay's time and effort over the last decade. Lindsay has helped many a concussed athlete—soft-tissue neck trauma is almost always part of any significant blow to the head—but the science and complexity of it goes way beyond that.