Dwight Howard receives bone marrow aspirate injection in his right knee

Key points from the doctor:

"Certainly expect him before the playoffs"

"Expect him to recover and play again this season"

Also said that Dwight would have recovered WITHOUT this procedure, this is just to make it even better and said there is nothing structurally wrong with the knee.

Sucks that he's out, but this sounds like best case scenario news.

 

That's what I took from it as well. Posters on this forum need to get off the ledge.

 

Good to see that he should return before the playoffs.

 

So the random bone bruise leads to mysterious edema and the cartilage injection is mostly for fun since Dwight doesn't need it to heal because there is no structural damage to the knee. The pointless cartilage injection will do its unnecessary thing while Dwight takes at least a month off to heal from the mysterious edema caused by the mysterious bone bruise that never healed the last time he took extended time off to heal it.

Sounds legit.

 

Thanks for posting Lowe's tweets. Perhaps this is indeed the case, and if in fact it is, Rockets fans have a reason to be hopeful. I am just very skeptical right now of whatever they say. We shall see in 30-40 days.

 

I guess I don't understand why people think Dr. Lowe would lie. What is his motivation?

Are you all anti-vaxxers as well?

 

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VastXQ_hPb0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[rQUOTEr]Dr. Walt Lowe, of the Memorial Hermann Sports Medicine Institute, believes Houston Rockets center Dwight Howard can return to action in plenty of time to be ready for the playoffs, if not well before.

Lowe conducted a bone marrow aspirate injection on Howard's sore right knee on Wednesday.

The team announced that Howard will be re-evaluated in four weeks.

"I would certainly expect him before the playoffs," Dr. Lowe said in an interview with FOX26 Sports. "I hope we have quite a few games before the playoffs.

"I really expect him to recover and play again this season."

Dr. Lowe said the goal of the injection is to help Howard recover faster.

He said there is nothing structurally wrong with Howard's knee.

"It's a biologically-active injection that helps almost anything and everything heal in the knee," Dr. Lowe said. "We took some bone marrow out of his pelvis. It gives us some young, very strong platelets with a lot of healing factors.

"I think his prognosis is great. This is something we did (Wednesday) to try to hasten the recovery time."

Dr. Lowe does not consider the injection as anything serious.

"It's really a shot," Dr. Lowe said. "It's not a surgical procedure. It's a 20-minute deal. I don't think it's a very big deal."

The team said Howard will begin going through the rehabilitation process immediately.

Dr. Lowe said that is designed to help Howard maintain his strength, so he will be ready to play when his knee recovers.

"We want to do everything we can to give Dwight the best chance of being back as fast as he can be back," Dr. Lowe said.

"The other side of that is we want him to feel like Dwight and be a 100 percent when he comes back. This sort of mixes those two things together. I think he would get well even without this (Wednesday)."

Dr. Lowe said he has performed this same procedure many times on pro football players who are able to return to action quickly.

"We're really treating this like a bone bruise," Dr. Lowe said. "There is nothing structurally wrong with his knee.

"That soreness is what we're trying to get rid of. The most important thing for Dwight is his pain gone. That's more important than what the MRI is going to show me in 4 weeks. As long as we're seeing a combination of bone bruise gone away, symptoms being better, then that's when we'll start the transition back to the court.

"The time frame for these bone bruises to heal is in that four to six week time frame. What makes this heal is essentially rest."

http://www.myfoxhouston.com/story/2...owards-knee-to-help-him-get-back-on-the-court[/rQUOTEr]

 

Some of us are bit skeptical based on the history the Rockets have when it comes to treating their players' injuries and how they release injury news to the fans.

This situation in particular is strange in that rest did nothing for the knee the first time. Why it will cure him now is a mystery to me. It becomes even stranger based on the statements from the doctor saying that the marrow injection was not necessary and is not even treatment for the bone bruise.

 

Nothing is structurally wrong, that is good, implying that the bone is ok, but the cartilage tissue is not ok.

 

If everything the Doctor is saying is true then I'm not worried especially with the quote about no structural damage to the knee.

 

just ait back and wait for it. Wait for it when the paun mysteriously comes back after the playoffs.

 

I dont think he's really lying, but as the team doctor, he has to give the best case scenario, hence expecting him to come back and play for the playoffs. If they really could say with certainty that 4 weeks max takes care of it, then we wouldn't be here to begin with. They would have fixed it after the first flare up in Oct or the second in Nov...yet here we are. Bottom line is, he doesn't know for sure.

If it was that cut and dry, then they would have just released one statement, focused around the fact that his knee is sound structurally and he just needed some time to let the edema clear and the knee heal. That's the best way to handle this issue from a PR standpoint...for some reason, they decided to be vague and let speculation run rampant, including within their fan base, which I can't imagine helps their trade leverage either. Just weird..

 

I see that they're saying rest will help. But he rested for 6 weeks already this season, and it didn't help a damn thing.

 

If that's true, why did they wait 3 weeks in Nov? And in the preseason, IIRC, he was only out about a week.

Time frame for these bone bruises is 4-6 weeks, but we'll only let our franchise center rest a week. Then on his next flare up only 3 weeks. Finally, on the third flare up, we'll actually rest him for the appropriate time frame.

 

I'm slowly stepping away from the ledge after that news.

 

Tim Grover?

[stirring the pot]

I've been traumatized by Yao and Tracy.

 

Have any NBA players in the past taken this injection?

also:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Funny that Lowe said procedure is like &quot;injecting teenagers' healing ability into someone's knee.&quot;</p>&mdash; Jonathan Feigen (@Jonathan_Feigen) <a href="https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Feigen/status/563106189215817728">February 4, 2015</a></blockquote>
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