I read the print edition Daily News every day on my commute into Manhattan. I realize, of course, that I could get all of it online on my iPhone, but I like the effect of seeing the front and back pages, plus I don’t think reading on such a tiny screen is good for my eyes or back.
Anyway, with all the Tony Galea stuff going on that vaguely involves Jose Reyes, Alex Rodriguez, Tiger Woods and now Carlos Beltran, something keeps jumping out at me: The Daily News consistently refers to the platelet-rich plasma therapy that Reyes underwent in June as “controversial,” but it never explains why the treatment is controversial, and I don’t remember it being controversial in the summer.
And it’s always in news stories, too. Actually, the columnists who have mentioned the story — Mike Lupica and Hank Gola — have avoided the term “controversial” when discussing blood-spinning, but just about every reporter mentioning the therapy has not. Check it out:
Michael O’Keefe: “controversial but legal therapy known as ‘blood spinning.’”
O’Keeffe and Teri Thompson: “a controversial technique called platelet-rich plasma injection therapy, also known as ‘blood spinning.’”
Thompson and Adam Rubin: “the controversial ‘blood-spinning’ or plasma-replacement therapy”
Thompson, O’Keeffe, Mark Feinsand and David Saltonstall: “the controversial – but legal – therapy known as ‘blood-spinning.’”
Thompson, O’Keeffe, Nathaniel Vinton and Christian Red: “a controversial blood-spinning treatment.”
I could continue. In all, platelet-rich plasma therapy has, by my count, been noted as controversial 13 times in the Daily News without any mention of the nature of the controversy surrounding the method.
And then there’s this, from a Gola column in December:
“It’s well-established in the sports medicine community to do this,” [Dr. Lewis] Maharam said. “The Steelers’ team physicians have done it with Hines Ward. The team physicians for the Giants have done it. I’ve done it on my patients. People at NYU have done it. It’s all over the country. I call it almost a magic bullet in sports medicine equivalent to when we first got MRI.”
So even though Maharam, the Daily News‘ sports-medicine expert on call, doesn’t note anything controversial about the treatment, the treatment can’t be noted in terms of Woods, A-Rod, Reyes or Beltran without mention of the massive, mysterious controversy surrounding it?
I’m confused. Certainly it’s bad if Galea was distributing HGH and other performance-enhancing drugs, because that’s illegal. And it’s bad if he was practicing medicine without a license, as he allegedly was in Florida, when he performed the platelet-rich plasma therapy on Woods.
And I’ll allow that it’s a little weird that all these guys had to go to Canada to get this treatment, which sounds, from all the reading I’ve done, like a relatively simple procedure.
But this New York Times article from last February makes it sound like the only potential controversy surrounding the treatment is whether or not it works.
And the treatment was not controversial even by the Daily News’ standard in September, when Sean Avery had the treatment, nor a couple of weeks before that when Katie Charles wrote a feature on the subject.
And platelet-rich plasma therapy did not seem controversial in any of the nine times it was mentioned in the Daily News before that, including when Reyes underwent the treatment in June.
Maybe I’m missing something, or I entirely missed something, or the Daily News neglected to cover some story that exposed to the world how blood-spinning therapy is a giant hoax or a stealthy way to inject patients with mind-control drugs or something. The only vaguely fishy thing I can dig up on it is that Brits call it “Dracula Therapy.” (Ed. Note: DRACULA THERAPY!)
Either way, since none of the 13 stories mention why exactly the treatment is controversial, since the treatment was apparently not controversial until it involved a slew of favorite N.Y. media whipping boys, and since several of the reports specify that the treatment is “legal” or “not illegal” — implying that its legality should be even in question — it strikes me that more than just blood is being spun.
Tedquarters 
Do you have the pull at SNY to mandate that all reporters/commentators refer to this procedure as “Dracula Therapy” for the duration of this story?
Ted,
My dad’s a doctor, and when this first came up, I asked him about the procedure. While he’s a gynecologist now, he used to be in sports medicine, and was the team doctor for the Stony Brook football team for a while. There is nothing remotely controversial about this procedure, it’s something that he says is “medical quackery” but isn’t remotely connected to PEDs, in any way.
Just his two cents.
That sounds about right. I’m now resisting the urge to make a joke about why the Stony Brook football team would need a gynecologist as their team doctor.
Well, that was during his residency, when he hadn’t really picked out a specialty yet, but hey, 2009 Big South champions, baby!
Nice work Ted,
Its just a shame that more people dont take the time to even reasonably comprhend what they read, let alone prove it wrong like you did.
Most poeple just automatically hit the panic button and eat up whatever the media feeds them. Like this morning in WFAN, boomer and carton were constantly just refering to this Dr Galea as a quack, or a ‘fugazi’ doctor etc.
Like you said if he was doing something illegal with HGH thats bad, but the guy was not a quack. If you research him on the interent he was/is a highly reputable doctor, on the boards of medical schools in canada, and was even theteam doctor for a couple CFL teams and an NHL team. He may have just done some illegal stuff. But its highly unlikely that everyone he saw was there for HGH.
The other thing that ticks me off is how the media keeps refering to the guy as ‘unlicesned’, purposely done to give the idea that the guy was some back alley doctor, pedaling drugs. He was not unlicensed, he just wasnt licensed to practice in the US. That would be like if a Canadian Hockey player came to see Dr. Altcheck, and the Canadian papers satrted saying they went to see some unlicensed physician, it would be stupid.
They’re not so much in the news business as the selling papers business. And as you note, hating on the mets is in fashion.
I was at dinner years ago with a friend and his friend, a sports reporter from one of the tabloids – I believe it was the Daily News, though I’m not certain. They had done an expose about some scandal involving a golfer, I think. Then further information had come out (elsewhere) debunking the story. So my friend says to his friend the reporter, “are you going to do a follow-up?” The reporter rolled his eyes and said, “oh, please. The only way we would do a follow-up is if we found further scandal.”
From the Wikipedia, “Using this procedure can fall foul of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) due to possible non-natural elements introduced into the athlete’s body.” The non-natural elements are calcium and thrombin (a coagulation protein), which are added to centrifuged blood (the athlete’s own), and the mixture is then re-injected into the athlete. So the only controversy referenced is one relating to a regulatory body that has nothing at all to do with MLB. (Whether it might have any bearing on the PGA I don’t know.)
(I guess whether it works or not might be a point of contention, as indicated by Devon’s post above, but that’s certainly not the type of controversy the News is alluding to.)
Interesting — I couldn’t even find a Wikipedia page for it. Wouldn’t that just be straight-up blood doping then? My understanding of the standard procedure is that it only uses elements of the patient’s own blood.
I think Josh nailed it. When I have read “controversial”, I had always assumed that it was controversial because it was a new type of blood-doping which is borderline acceptable, but clearly neither banned nor frowned upon in either the NFL or MLB.
Jose seems to be in the clear (no pun intended) here. He has been nothing but candid, and he met with the Feds without an attorney. A-Rod’s connections with this “doctor”, however, are highly suspicious because they were previously unknown and have yet to be explained. And while Jose has been candid, A-Rod has refused to discuss his treatments with this “doctor.” Lets hope that Beltran doesn’t start looking like A-Rod here.
The above link should shed some more light on the alleged controversy.
But you’re right that in throwing around the word “controversial” without explanation, the News is making an implication which is clearly not warranted.
Its a procedure that has yet to undergo significan’t scientific testing and show real benefits. That being said, based on what I know in my grand 1.5 years in medicine, I’d say that it can’t really hurt. Jury’s out on whether any benefit is chalked up to the placebo effect or not.