ANY GIVEN MONDAY

A fully functional sports manual focused on the awareness and prevention of common athletic injuries.

Andrews, a pioneering orthopedic surgeon in his fifth decade of practicing sports medicine, is uniquely qualified to pen this type of medical sourcebook. He firmly believes many organized-sports ailments are preventable, and he aggressively advocates for grass-roots educational programs and prevention campaigns as effective frontline measures aimed at tempering the “crisis point” injury level he feels has been reached for youth-sports injuries. In the opening chapters, the author offers a condensed history of sports medicine, pertinent statistics and a snapshot profile of his life. Andrews then highlights three trauma priorities as assigned by the top sports-injury authorities: knee ACL damage, concussions (football) and overuse injuries (juvenile baseball pitchers). He states that while the “invincibility” felt by youth enables athletic injuries, increased parental involvement in children’s sporting lives should stem this pattern. After citing baseball as the source of the highest number of acute injuries, Andrews calls attention to accident-prone, less-obvious activities like cheerleading, golf and water polo. Medically speaking, he forewarns parents not to consider an MRI test for their ailing child as the exclusive method of diagnostic conclusiveness and offers a fascinating chapter dispelling popular sports-injury myths. The bulk of the guidebook briskly examines a wide swath of popular youth sports and counters their associated maladies with safety tips and injury-prevention measures.

A gold mine of contemporary cautionary information for the sports-minded.