Apr 20, 2015

Switching Gears

After announcing in March a plan to recommend required heart screenings for some NCAA athletes, including men’s basketball players, the association’s Chief Medical Officer has pumped the brakes on his proposal. The Wall Street Journal reports that Brian Hainline still supports the idea, but he will now work for such a recommendation through normal NCAA channels rather than making a unilateral declaration.

“If things happen in three years instead of now, I am infinitely happier than if we were to continue having the same argument that we’ve been having since 1985,” Hainline said.

Hainline’s initial plans were met with a flurry of resistance from 100 or so team physicians who signed a petition asking him to reconsider. Opposition to required screenings centers on insufficient infrastructure for the testing, a lack of team physicians qualified to read the test results, and false positives. The Journal also reported that debate over the issue on a mailing list run by the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine became so heated that it had to be shut down.

The T&C cover story from December 2013 looked at some schools that have implemented pre-participation heart screenings.