Science Knows

Science Knows is where I will share some of the challenges and experiences I faced as a professional athlete. I will emphasize when I was able to use scientific literature to aid in decisions about my health and training. I hope that this blog will give the reader information on how to interpret and recognize reliable information about health and athletics. I will be sharing everything I know about what is considered "good science". This means scientific research that holds up to rigorous scientific standards. I will also be giving examples of unreliable sources of information. I like many have been confused by fads, and articles based on unreliable sources and research. I will share what I have learned throughout my athletic and academic experiences. My hope is to help other athletes and sport enthusiasts make confident decisions about their own health and training based on scientific research.

From Crutches To The Olympics In 8 Months

What is reliable scientific evidence?

I have taken some amazing courses at Quest University and one of my favourites is called Evidence Based Health practices. This course taught me how to examine the quality of evidence behind the treatments, training regimes, and diets that I used throughout my athletic career. I discovered that there are different kinds of scientific evidence and some evidence is more reliable than others. Two of the most unreliable forms of evidence are anecdotal evidence and case studies. Anecdotal evidence is based on one person’s interpretation of their experience, such as testimonials, whereas a case study shows the results of a one person study with the experience documented by a researcher. Nevertheless, these types of evidence are important in the process of designing a quality experimental study. To make an evidence based decisions, it is best to look at repeatable, high quality experimental research conducted with large groups of people. This way you can be confident that the results shown in the study, are the results that you will experience. If the evidence is only based on one other person, there is no way to tell if you will experience the same results as that person. I would like to share a story where I examined different types of evidence in order to make an important decision about my health and ski career.

In April 2013, I was on track to compete at the 2014 Winter Olympics and I was hoping to win a medal for Canada.

I had just finished up one of the most successful seasons of my ski career, finishing top five at almost every world cup, 4th at X games and 3rd at the Olympic test event in Sochi, Russia. I was not only on route to qualify and compete at the upcoming winter Olympics, I was a contender for the podium. In May 2013, I began to prepare for the upcoming Olympic season at an on snow camp in Mammoth, Ca. It was the beginning of a normal training day for me and I was riding up the chairlift. I clenched and stretched my hands as I looked over at the halfpipe. It had been especially warm in Mammoth this week, so the only snow to be seen was all pushed together in one spot, that’s where the halfpipe was, there was a single skinny track of snow leading from the chair to the halfpipe. One head phone was in my ear, playing my favorite ski playlist, pumping me up for the day of training. “Here we go” I remember thinking as I got off the chairlift. I put my other headphone in and decided I would focus on my usual warm up, deal with my new tricks later in the day. It was a beautiful sunny day, the halfpipe was in good condition and I was riding well.

In May 2013, I crashed and injured my knee. The injury was severe enough that I would likely need surgery.

When I look back, I don’t remember feeling any pain, but I do remember being terrified to move. I had wanted my helmet off, I wanted my goggles off, I felt like I couldn’t breath. I knew something was seriously wrong after my coach had clicked off my skis and carried me over to the sled to be taken off the hill. I remember thinking, “I don’t have time for this right now, I need to keep training to prepare for the Olympics.” I tried to hold back the tears that were coming, not because of the pain, I remembered how long my friends knee injuries had taken to heal. I had torn the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my knee. This ligament is extremely important in stabilizing the knee and knee stability is crucial for freestyle skiing. Sometimes, an athlete can build up enough leg strength to stabilize the knee without the ACL ligament. However, at a high level skiing, this is only a temporary fix with a high risk of causing further damage to the knee. After MRI imaging confirmed by injury, I sought out the advice of one of the top knee surgeons in Canada.

The surgeon advised that I would need surgery before I could return to competitive skiing based on the damage to my knee and my physical build.

This advice came from one of the most trusted knee surgeons in Canada. I was sitting on one of those wheel in hospital beds, with blue and white sheets, my legs outstretched in front of me. Both knees still looked the same to me, one was just a little swollen. The surgeon examined my knee by pulling on it and testing the movement, referring back to the MRI image. He looked at me, sighed and told me I would most likely need surgery. My chest tightened and I felt light headed, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Next, I heard my mother's voice, “she is so close to qualifying for the Olympics, she just needs one more result, is it possible for her to ski in 6 months after having surgery?” The surgeon said he would do his best and that there were options in a situation like this. I still said nothing, I just stared at my knees. I nodded when the doctor told me he would do everything he could to help me ski that season. After an ACL reconstruction surgery, the usual recovery time to return to competitive sport is around 1 year.

The surgeon gave me two options to choose from.

I could attempt to ski without an ACL, which could fail and result in a worse injury. Or I could have the surgery, return to competition early and ski in a lot of pain. However, my surgeon was confident that if I received surgery, he could make my new ligament last the season, but I would have to work extremely hard and endure the pain of returning to snow before the knee had fully healed. I trusted my surgeon’s advice because he is a qualified expert, who has knowledge of both recent scientific studies and personal cases of working with athletic knee injuries. Yet, I was in a desperate place, at the time neither option seemed like a good one. I wanted to find an alternative option. Before making my choice, I gathered as much information as possible about fixing ACL ligaments. Luckily, I had the help of my family and other trusted experts including my surgeon, the Canadian National Teams head of fitness/health, physiotherapists and chiropractors to help research other options. Our research question was, what is the quickest way to fix an ACL ligament?

I heard a anecdotal story about how an athlete had treated an ACL injury with prolotherapy and it had healed in only a few months.

Prolotherapy is a series of injections mainly used to treat arthritis. The treatment had been successful in healing the ACL ligament and had only taken a few months! This was perfect! That was exactly what I needed. Immediately I was convinced, but thankfully my mother was not, and she knew how to find out if this was reliable evidence. My mother searched for other scientific studies conducted with prolotherapy. She wanted to know if this type of treatment had worked for other ligament repairs. It turns out there was only one case study using the treatment on a ACL ligament, there were no other studies that showed that this was a successful treatment.

The research did show that the most successful recoveries occured after having a surgery that would fix the ligament.

I chose to have the surgery, putting my trust in previous research and my surgeons advice. Reliable scientific evidence also supported that this was the best choice regarding the long term health of my knee. After a lot of hard work, I ended up skiing three months out of surgery, competing at six months, then qualifying and competing at the 2014 Winter Olympics in February 2014. I would call that a win for evidence based decision making!

#GamePlanChampion #QuestUniversity