Falvey Jordan moving with the sports medicine times

With strong backgrounds across a variety of codes, Prof. Éanna Falvey and Dr Joe Jordan, consultant sports and exercise medicine physicians, are ideally placed being at the forefront of sports injury treatment in Cork.

The new Falvey Jordan Sports Medicine clinic at City Gate in Mahon was recently opened by An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin TD, and the hope is that it will take therapy in the field to a new level.

The pair will celebrate four years of partnership in October, with their respective experiences helping to provide the best care.

“Éanna is a former Irish heavyweight champion boxer,” says Jordan, a former Cork hurler.

“Not only that, he’s kind of the driver of sports medicine in this country since he started down that pathway in 2007 – up to the point of being Lions doctor on two occasions.

“From my perspective, it was fantastic joining Éanna in practice in 2021 - it's not every day you'd have the Lions doctor at your doorstep in Cork!".

“What we're trying to do here is for essentially elite sports medicine care, which really I suppose has been there with Éanna, but now I suppose with a bit of strength in numbers, it can be probably pushed on and moved on.

"Being able to deliver this level of care in Cork is great and we have built a great relationship with the wider medical community - surgeons, GPs, physios, S&C coaches, etc. Having a collegiate attitude is key in this area of medicine."

In the modern era, when players in different sports can have compacted schedules, speed is of the essence, as Falvey outlines.

“When I came back from Australia in 2007, the big thing was Irish people were wanting the same as the elite level of care,” he says.

“That's why people are willing to travel up the country to clinics and stuff like that, and being able to provide that in Cork in the Munster area, is something we're very proud of.

“What we're trying to promote here is that we're opening up access to players in the area for a quick turnaround in terms of acute injury.

“At this time of year in particular now, guys are getting ready for a championship and it’s all run off very quickly.

“For somebody to have an injury which takes a couple of weeks to get diagnosed and managed, it can be their season on the line.

“What the new facility is allowing us to do is, say you have an injury on a Sunday, by Wednesday you have imaging, you're seen by somebody and you have a plan in place for what's going to happen for you.

“The move to the new facility means that we've got the ability to access the imaging and we've got the space and the people to do that.

“Joe's background as a Cork hurler, he knows what it's like at this time of the year to be missing out when the going is good.”

Even in the near-two-decade period that Falvey has been practising, there have been major developments, both in sports medicine and the approach of clubs and sportspeople.

“You have club teams now who have dedicated strength and conditioning teams and most teams have a gym,” Falvey says.

“Your average player is an awful lot better prepared and fitter now than he was even back in 2007.

“You're still getting your soft-tissue ligament injury and stuff like that, you know, your ACLs and your medial collateral ligaments and your ankle injuries but I think there's a growing appreciation that, you know, every club has a really good player who, when he was 18 or 19, tore his hamstring now he re-injures it once or twice a year for the rest of his career and he's that really good guy who, if you could keep him fit, would make a difference for the team.

“Every club has a couple of them and what we now realise from advances in research in this area is that there are players who would have had a significant injury to the tendon within the muscle of either their hamstring or quad back in the day and then that keeps re-injuring.

“Now, the fact that we have access to timely imaging means that you can pick up that guy and a small percentage of those guys actually sometimes need an operation to repair the tendon.

“Most of them, if you get the diagnosis right and you get the rehab right, it settles fully, it's put to bed and it's not something which he injures four or five times over the course of a year and then he's injuring once or twice a year for the rest of his playing career and it causes fellas to give up.

“The way this is now is that, you're four weeks after your injury now, your MRI scan shows that you have a significant tendon injury within the muscle and you have a 60-70 percent risk of tearing that again if you play in the next two weeks.

“If, however, you wait for three or four week, it'll settle fully and your risk is down that 5-10 percent, back what it was when you started.

“So, you have a choice to make. Maybe you might decide you're still going to play, but at least you're going to make that decision based on information rather than a wild guess.”

Clarity is vital, especially as there is constant evolution in terms of assessing injuries and how they are treated.

“Recognition of the injury really is probably the first thing,” Jordan says.

“We probably didn't realise that there was such a thing as an intramuscular tendon injury until about 2015.

“No hamstring injury is created equal and it's very, very important that you know the precise location of the hamstring injury and also to what extent the hamstring is injured.

“All of that will come into play in terms of when Éanna or I will be saying to a player, this is X injury to X part of the hamstring – it involves this structure and it's going to take this amount of time to return.

“What Éanna and I are probably trying to achieve and what we probably pride ourselves on is having that, you know, total accuracy of diagnosis from day one.

“A coach is wondering on a Monday afternoon after an injury at the weekend, they know that this player has this injury and if everything progresses along the expected timelines, they will hopefully return around this time.

“So, what we're really doing is we're trying to set up a situation where there is unbelievable accuracy around their original diagnosis because, I think, without a diagnosis, it's very difficult to speculate on anything else.

“We will be really strong on proper clinical assessment – us looking at the images ourselves to be very, very sure of our ground in terms of what the injury is.

“Then it would be a collaborative approach, in that we have a strength and conditioning coach now within the clinic here, who will start the patient on the pathway, give them their initial rehab.

“Then it will be back, of course, to their local physiotherapist and local medical team to bring the case on further and then we're there in the background if there are any speed bumps along the road.”

And, like any squad, Falvey Jordan have a lot of depth, ensuring the best service.

“One of the biggest things on this is the administrative aspect of it,” Falvey says, “people being able to get replies to messages, people being able to get a timely appointment, being able to get their stuff sorted.

“We've got three amazing administrative staff and then in addition to myself and Joe, we have Professor Jon Patricios, a consultant sports and exercise medicine physician, who comes from South Africa. He comes over to us six times a year.

“Then, we have the expertise then of Dr Edel Fanning, shoulder rehabilitation specialist, and Dr Fearghal Kerin, a hamstring rehabilitation specialist, so it's quite a big team in terms of our availability right now, and then we have strength and conditioning coach Luke Cahill as well, who's there to help on the back-end with the guys who are getting back on the road.”