Yankees' Aaron Judge remains sidelined with right rib stress fracture | The Injury Report

Yankees fans don't get mad at me because you know this already Aaron Judge still isn't ready for baseball activity after they re-imaged that affected rib area following six plus weeks on the IL. So in today's injury report let's bring in Dr. Craig Pilley primary care sports medicine physician at NYU Langone to see if we can get some sort of a timeline on when the captain could be back in action in the Bronx. Doc appreciate you hopping on with us your area of expertise is the reason why we're bringing you in here because Yankees fans people everybody out there is just worried about how bad this guy's ribs are and the injury actually is because he said they shied away from the stationary bike and are limiting him to an inclined treadmill for now we're talking about six plus weeks doc what does that tell you about how much that rib area has healed? So you know rib stress fractures are really tough injuries and can be very painful for athletes right and we know that this is not Judge's first go-around with this sort of injury at the end of 2019 he had a similar injury with not so great an outcome right he had some complications from that it was a persistent course and really the only time he didn't miss the only reason he didn't miss a lot of time was because of that COVID shortened season following 2019 and so recurrent stress injuries in the same area can make these injuries more stingy more persistent and more difficult to deal with they usually at a baseline necessitate like six weeks or so of just about complete rest avoidance of pain not doing anything that is particularly uncomfortable or painful for the athlete and it wouldn't surprise me if this is a more deliberate rehab and recovery process for all parties involved given his injury history and his importance for the Yankees going forward. I think where he's at right now tells us this injury needs some more time to cool off he's not in uncharted territory yet though depending on severity of injury for these rib stress fractures data shows us a pretty wide range of acceptable return to sport anywhere from six to seven weeks for early or mild injury all the way to 12 to 14 weeks for kind of the more severe or complex injuries all right so you know we're not under the realm of abnormal right now. Million dollar question here let's say a patient normal patient comes into your office with the same injury as our Aaron judge we'll call that patient arson judge is there a rehab and return to uh to to work for work or just normal life is that the same? Yeah you know look it's similar in many ways for just about any sort of stress injury right the milestones graded approach to rehabilitation are the same we still need to see a patient comfortable with routine exercise routine activities before advancing to more specific sport exercise and I think the thing that's really important here is that in most of these stress fracture cases oftentimes the overuse of a specific sport exercise is why this injury is happening in the first place so in judge's case throwing a baseball swinging a bat diving across the outfield right all of those repetitive impacts can cause stress and overuse in this bone and we see it a lot in rowers and golfers other sort of repetitive athletes too that can get these injuries and so really removing the offending agent for a period of time is the hallmark here right we need to allow the body to calm down and heal itself down before we reintroduce those activities.