As promised... I'm going to talk about the PBATS Conference that I went to. PBATS stands for Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers' Society. They, along with the NATA, hosted the conference. The title of the conference was "Injury Prevention and Treatment Techniques" and it was not just for professional baseball ATCs. All athletic trainers were there, from high school to pro, and we all learned so much about treatments for different baseball specific injuries. Since this is a blog about females in the profession, I will address that first. The ratio of men to women was basically a lot to a little. I think out of the 200 people that were at the conference, about 20 of them were females. It was sad to see such little representation, but I can uncerstand why. The majority of ATCs at the conference were pro, and the female population is underrepresented at the professional level. But, as I said, any level ATC can go to that conference, so maybe the word will get out and there will be more females to network with the pros.
So back to the actual conference... The whole first half of day 1 was about Tommy John's surgery, which kind of sounds boring, right? But it wasn't. There were a lot of people there talking about new ways to do the surgery and also new ways to rehab it. Things are always changing for this injury. We learned about how the current throwing program is probably not the best way to do the treatment. We should do gradual progressions with breaks in between instead of just going through the whole program in 12 months straight. It SHOULD take about 14 months to rehab anyway, so whoever thought that 12 months was a good time frame seems to be misled. There was another talk about how SLAP tears can be classified as good or bad... That talk was awesome. He talked about how there is actually a "functional" SLAP tear that your body accomodates sometimes and that they don't necessarily need surgery. What?! No labrum surgery for baseball players with a SLAP? No way! But the talk made sense. It compared other injuries or anomolies in the body that are "functional" that don't need correction and said if the labrum tear doesn't cause pain, maybe it is supposed to be there. That it doesn't need anything besides rehab to make it stronger and more stable. What?! That's crazy! We talked about PRP and how there's no scientific evidence to prove that it works. Same with Kinesiotape. Foot and ankle injuries, wrist and hand injuries, hip and groin injuries were all covered. We got to go to Dodgers Stadium for lunch on day 2 and got a tour. I would say I liked the tour a lot, especially because we had different breakout seession in different parts of the stadium like the clubhouse and the cage. But we didn't get to see the ATR so I was a bit disappointed on that aspect. We met Orel Hershiser and he also gave us a little background of himself and had answered a lot of questions. He explained the way he figured out how he was supposed to pitch and why that worked better than how he was taught. Overall, the conference was awesome. Below is the link to get some of the Powerpoints that were presented during the conference.
A few improvements to the conference I would have is to make it more engaging... I felt like my friends and I were falling asleep through some of the presentations. I also feel like it should be maybe 4 days for a shorter amount of time each day instead of 3 days and have so much to talk about in day 2. But other than those 2 things... I think we had a great time and there's a lot to learn. Like I said... it's not just for pro ATCs. High school athletic trainers were there too! It's a great learning experience for everyone. Check out the link below to look at some of the presentations from the conference! And if you have any questions about any aspect of the conference, feel free to ask!
http://www.baseballmedicineconference.com/Agenda/
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