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Arab News
2 days ago
- Health
- Arab News
Spurs' Victor Wembanyama says he's been cleared to return following blood clot
NEW YORK: San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama expects to play this coming season and has been fully cleared after dealing with deep vein thrombosis in his shoulder for the past few months, he told the French newspaper L'Equipe in remarks published Monday. For the latest updates, follow us @ArabNewsSport A person familiar with the situation later told The Associated Press that the Spurs have indeed received word that Wembanyama has been cleared to resume play and, barring anything unforeseen, will be able to fully participate in training camp when it opens this fall. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the team has not revealed that detail publicly. It has been expected that the team anticipated Wembanyama would be able to start this coming season, though there was no official word until now. 'I'm officially cleared to return. … I'll finally be able to play a bit of basketball again,' Wembanyama told the French sports daily. The fact that Wembanyama has been cleared suggests that his type of DVT was provoked, which would rule out a genetic predisposition to a clot returning. The Spurs have not disclosed specifics of Wembanyama's shoulder issue, but there is a type of DVT that appears when a blood vessel in someone's upper arm can be compressed by a rib (the top rib is removed in some cases to relieve the compression, if that is the cause) or a muscle. Such issues have proven to be treatable in the past. Many other athletes have dealt with similar issues. Serena Williams came back to dominate women's tennis after a clotting issue following the birth of her daughter; Williams needed four surgeries to address the matter. Basketball Hall of Famer Chris Bosh had to eventually retire from the NBA after he was diagnosed with multiple clots. In hockey, Tomas Fleischmann developed clots and went on to play for years afterward; Tomas Vokoun needed surgery to relieve his clotting problem and never played in the NHL again. 'I was afraid of not being able to play basketball anymore,' Wembanyama said in the interview. 'I think that we all have thoughts sometimes. Irrational thoughts about the things we care about most. But this type of thinking also changes you as a person, for the better.' Wembanyama was the league's rookie of the year two years ago, Spurs guard Stephon Castle won that same trophy this past season, and the team has added another high pick — this year's No. 2 selection, Dylan Harper — to a super-promising young core. Wembanyama was the front-runner to be defensive player of the year last season when he was diagnosed with the blood clot in his right shoulder in February. 'My injury was an adventure, obviously, but the hardest part is over,' he told L'Equipe. 'I'm much better today, physically and mentally.' Wembanyama was averaging 24.3 points, 11 rebounds, 3.8 blocks and 3.7 assists per game when he was shut down in February; the only other player in NBA history to finish a season averaging all that was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1975-76. There will be an obvious ramping-up period before Wembanyama is playing at full speed again, though there is plenty of time between now and training camp for him to get back to that level. 'I have to continue specific work on my shoulder and especially get back into everything related to my basketball habits,' Wembanyama said in the interview. 'It's been five months since I've played a 5-on-5 match. If I had to have a game tomorrow, it would be risky. There are plenty of reflexes to find, both conscious and linked to muscle memory.' Wembanyama has traveled extensively in recent months and spent time last month at a Shaolin temple in Zhengzhou, China. The temple is a place that welcomes visitors who wish to study Chan meditation, Shaolin Kung Fu, traditional Chinese medicine and more. Wembanyama told L'Equipe that he studied kung fu and Buddhism during his stay there, but added that he does not identify as Buddhist. 'We were initiated there to the life of a warrior monk, which combines Buddhism and intensive kung fu practice,' he said. 'It was very hard. We discovered movements that we had never done in our lives. It was more than 1,000 kicks to do per day, jumps, balance exercises, stretching. ... We used muscles that we rarely used and which were quickly overloaded. I had some of the biggest aches and pains of my life.'
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
‘I almost had my leg amputated because of medical malpractice'
When Grace Ofori-Attah was a teenager, she was a keen netball player with a big group of friends. She was involved in student film, and she loved to write, having her first novel picked up by an agent when she was just 20. Then, as she was studying for her final exams at the University of Cambridge, she became 'increasingly out of breath', with pain in her legs and across her hips so severe it prevented her from sleeping at night. As a medical student, she respected the judgement of the GP she consulted, who wrote her symptoms off as stress, anxiety, asthma, sciatica, and then just 'that I wasn't healthy'. But 'you know when your body is dying,' she says, 20 years on. 'I was very, very ill, but these doctors were telling me that there was nothing wrong.' Eventually Ofori-Attah was left unable to walk, and was given a wheelchair by her college. The day before her medical exams began, 'my next door neighbour, who was this wonderful mathematician who I'd never spoken to, carried me with another student to the GP'. This time she was seen by a different doctor. 'He said, 'You have to go straight to the hospital. You can't sit your exams.'' It was deep vein thrombosis (DVT). There were clots all over her body, a 'huge one' near her heart. 'As someone who's a real geek, I just started crying. He said, 'If you don't go to the hospital now, you probably won't live to the end of the week.'' Today, Ofori-Attah know s that what happened to her as a student was medical malpractice. Her college doctor's negligence could have cost her a limb, or even her life. For a time, doctors at the hospital she was treated in 'thought I had lung cancer, because the clots were so extensive,' she says. 'They were also unsure whether or not they were going to have to amputate the leg.' Her parents had cause to sue, but the family took no action, and accepted the practice's apology. 'They're both very Christian. Eventually they just said to me, 'Look, you're going to be a doctor, and you're going to make mistakes too.'' Ofori-Attah recovered, without losing her leg, and she did go on to qualify as a doctor. She moved to the University of Oxford to finish her medical degree and eventually became a consultant psychiatrist, specialising in addiction. Experiencing malpractice herself, 'really did inform how I felt about medicine going forward, and how I saw the medical education I'd had,' she says. She decided to leave the profession five years ago. There was no dramatic exit. She became a doctor for the same reason that she is now a full-time screenwriter: that she was 'always interested in people, and why they do the things they do,' she says. Her most successful drama, ITV's Malpractice, is directly inspired by what she saw over the course of her medical career. At the start of the hit series, a man walks into the reception of West Yorkshire Royal Hospital with a gun. Angry and covered in blood, he demands that main character, Dr Lucinda Edwards, immediately treats a man who lies motionless on the floor next to him, with a bullet hole in his chest. It sounds far-fetched, but when Ofori-Attah was in Dr Edwards' shoes as a junior doctor working in A&E, 'there were two bodies, not one', she says. She declines to go into specifics, out of doctorly respect for her former patients' privacy, 'but whatever you see in Malpractice, the truth is probably worse.' The crisis leads to the death of a young woman under Dr Edwards' care who has had a drug overdose, leading the doctor to be investigated for malpractice, despite her impossible position. Ofori-Attah's parents were right: under the pressure of acute disasters, or just the day-to-day churn of patients who desperately need help, real-life doctors do make mistakes. It has only become more frequent since their daughter left university. Between 2023 and 2024, the NHS received 13,784 new clinical negligence claims and reports of incidents, compared with the 11,945 cases reported in the year up to 2014. Serious mistakes are common. Research suggests that one in twenty hospital deaths are avoidable, and are therefore a result of malpractice. Doctors have called for the General Medical Council (GMC), which investigates complaints about practitioners, to be scrapped. The British Medical Association (BMA) – the union that represents two-thirds of doctors in Britain – has pushed for the overhaul as it believes that the GMC is 'failing to protect patients'. At the same time, victims of malpractice often want to see doctors be held responsible publicly. The families of three people murdered in Nottingham in June 2023, have asked that the doctors who approved the release of killer Valdo Calocane from a psychiatric ward be named in the press, to provide accountability for 'poor leadership and bad decision-making'. Ofori-Attah believes that doctors should not be named 'until proven guilty'. The GMC will never be scrapped, she believes, but 'the way that they investigate doctors seriously needs to be looked at'. The process 'goes on for months', she says. 'It's not uncommon for doctors to commit suicide before the end of an investigation. Often when that happens, they're found not to have committed malpractice in the first place. It is so, so stressful.' Then there is the ordeal of the coroners' courts, which most doctors must face at some point. Here, grieving family members can cross-examine doctors who give evidence. So extreme is the situation that 'people assumed I must have made it up when it happened to Dr Edwards in Malpractice,' Ofori-Attah says. She would know. While working in a psychiatric hospital, Ofori-Attah herself was criticised by the grieving family of a patient who had taken their own life following a stay in the hospital where she worked. 'It was one of those situations where the whole team had been in agreement that this patient could leave the hospital. It was my job to approve a more junior doctor's assessment,' she says. After the patient was discharged, they were admitted to a private hospital, which they later left, before they died. Their parents wrote a letter to the hospital, which 'singled out my name in the notes due to its origin,' she says. 'They queried my competence and ability to speak English, and my qualifications, having never met me, and assumed that these factors must have contributed to their relative's suicide. 'It was unusual, and hurtful, that the parents took objection to me specifically. They wrote to the trust about this 'foreign doctor', who presumably didn't have good qualifications, and they wanted to know where I'd studied. I had to go to the coroner's court to give evidence on the stand, knowing that this family was going to be there with all these presumptions about my lack of ability.' Once her patient's parents heard her speak in the stand, however, they came to her and apologised. 'Because they had now heard me speak, they knew that I was not what they had imagined, and they understood that I had done my best for their child. I was so shocked, because I was only expecting anger from them.' In the end, no claim of medical negligence was ever pursued. Her ITV drama showed viewers what she knows about malpractice: that doctors inevitably make mistakes under pressure, no matter how well-trained and experienced they may be. But she also wanted lay people to know that 'anyone can be accused of anything', including a doctor whose Old Bailey trial she sat as a juror for, before she quit the profession. 'I was sitting there listening to the evidence, and I knew that there was no physiological way that what that doctor was accused of could have happened.' The doctor had already been named in the press. 'It's so unfair that this can happen, until there's evidence to support it.' How the public sees doctors has shifted dramatically in the last few years, Ofori-Attah says. Once, she and her colleagues were put on a pedestal. Now – thanks to a combination of an increase in real failures caused by pressure on the NHS, and pay strikes by junior doctors – 'we don't have the same support any more'. It's part of why many of her Oxbridge-educated colleagues have left the profession, or have moved abroad to continue practicing. 'You're there for patients, and if patients don't trust you, then it's very difficult to do your job.' As a writer, Ofori-Attah now finds that she can speak to patients in a way that she never could as a doctor. At the end of one exhausting day early in her career, 'I went to see a short film about depression that some of my sisters' friends had made,' she recalls. 'I'd been in the hospital all day, trying to get patients to follow treatment plans, and it's a function of being a doctor that they're not often that interested in what you have to say.' Seeing how her sister and her friends could reach people through their work 'was life-changing'. She then turned her hand to writing dialogue, having never been able to finish her novel. The script she wrote in two weeks, in a 'kind of creative manic flurry', became Malpractice. Despite all of her own trials as a doctor, and as a patient, Ofori-Attah can see herself going back to medicine one day. 'Leaving in the pandemic made it easier, because everything was so awful, but I really miss speaking to so many people from different walks of life, being there with them in some of their hardest or most important moments,' she says. 'There's no way of quantifying what that feels like. It's a real privilege.'
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Milwaukee Bucks star Damian Lillard reflects back on his Achilles injury - "34 a torn Achilles...History etch it in..."
Damian Lillard. Image via: Getty Images The Milwaukee Bucks' star player, Damian Lillard, posted a series of photos on his social media and captioned them with something that seemed to have hinted at his recent Achilles injury. His recent post sounded more like a poetic device rather than just a normal caption. The post has received lots of responses and comments from his fans who have supported him all throughout. The injury, as Damian Lillard said, would be etched in history and would have a significant impact on his NBA career. After bidding farewell to their star player with a very simple statement, the Milwaukee Bucks reportedly agreed to sign Myles Turner to a 4-year, $107 million contract. Damian Lillard makes a poetic reflection on his Achilles injury After the Milwaukee Bucks gave him a fond farewell through one of their posts on X, it was now Damian Lillard's time to say something about his career. The first thing to have popped into his mind was his dreadful Achilles tendon injury. '34 a torn Achilles … History etch it in … a Mona Lisa Typa sketch within…', he captioned his Instagram post. At the age of just 34, he suffered from a very serious injury that tore his Achilles tendon. He compared his injury to the famous portrait of Mona Lisa, which is instilled into the minds of people even today. So will his injury. According to Damian Lillard, this injury is going to create history in the world of the NBA. 'A leader as resilient and clutch as they come. You gave your all for this team and this city. Thank you, Dame,' the Milwaukee Bucks carved a very simple yet beautiful message on social media. Fans were overwhelmed by this heartwarming message as they bade farewell to their favorite NBA star. Damian Lillard's career with the Bucks was more than just a legacy. He has scored some extraordinary points for the team and led them to several remarkable victories. In March, he injured himself in his right calf, which was later identified as DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis). Later in Game 2, against the Pacers, he suffered his ultimate downfall, thereby injuring and tearing his left Achilles tendon. This had a deep impact on him, and it jeopardized his entire NBA career. According to fans, the Damian Lillard era has officially ended, thus breaking the hearts of several worldwide. Also read: 'Y'all did my GOAT dirty' - Milwaukee Bucks' 'Thank You' note to Damian Lillard received strong words from fans Game On Season 1 continues with Mirabai Chanu's inspiring story. Watch Episode 2 here.
Khaleej Times
06-07-2025
- Health
- Khaleej Times
UAE travel: Long flights could increase blood clot risks, doctors warn
As summer travel peaks, doctors have urged residents with pre-existing health concerns to get medical clearance before flying, and also watch for post-flight symptoms like chest pain or leg swelling. A UAE resident, who returned from an eight-hour flight from the UK, ended up in the ICU after developing a serious blood clot in his lungs, a condition known as pulmonary embolism (PE). The man arrived at RAK Hospital's Emergency Department with persistent chest pain that had lasted three days, was quickly diagnosed and treated. Doctors say the case is a stark reminder of the potential health risks linked to prolonged immobility during air travel. The patient was diagnosed with acute PE through CT pulmonary angiography and admitted to the ICU. He received anticoagulant therapy and was discharged in stable condition. But medical experts say the incident could have been life-threatening if left untreated. 'Pulmonary embolism often starts as a blood clot in the leg, deep vein thrombosis (DVT), which can travel to the lungs and block blood flow,' said Dr Suha Alsheikh Suleman, specialist pulmonologist at RAK Hospital. 'Long-haul flights increase this risk significantly, especially in people who are obese, pregnant, have respiratory or cardiac issues, or a history of clots.' Doctors across the UAE are now urging travelers to take simple but crucial precautions during flights, and to take any unusual post-flight symptoms seriously. Who's at risk? According to Dr Marian Malak Eshak Morkos, specialist family medicine at Burjeel Day Surgery Center in Al Shahama, travelers with the following conditions should consult their doctor before flying long distances: Heart disease or recent surgery Chronic respiratory conditions such as COPD or asthma Uncontrolled diabetes Recent illnesses like pneumonia or COVID-19 High-risk pregnancy (especially third trimester) History of blood clots "A proper pre-travel consultation helps determine whether oxygen support or preventive medication is needed,' said Dr Marian. Stay safe in the sky Dry cabin air, cramped seating, and reduced mobility during long-haul flights can combine to increase clotting risk, especially when travelers skip hydration or remain sedentary for long hours. "Cabin air is extremely dry, and people forget to hydrate,' added Dr Marian. 'When you combine that with sitting for six hours or more, and possibly drinking alcohol or caffeine, it's a perfect storm for clot formation.' Doctors recommend: Getting up and walking every 1–2 hours during the flight Drinking plenty of water. Avoid alcohol, caffeine, and smoking Wearing compression stockings if advised by a doctor Avoiding sedatives that might reduce mobility For high-risk patients such as those with cancer or known clotting disorders, a dose of blood thinner like low-molecular-weight heparin may be prescribed before flying, based on individual risk. Don't ignore these symptoms Symptoms of a blood clot can appear during the flight or days after landing. Doctors highlighted the importance of recognizing warning signs early: 'These are not just signs of jet lag or fatigue, they may be life-threatening,' said Dr Suha. 'If ignored, PE can result in lung damage, heart strain, or even sudden death.' What to do mid-air? If symptoms arise during a flight, travelers are advised to notify the cabin crew immediately. 'Most airlines are equipped for in-flight medical situations,' said Dr Marian. 'If oxygen is available, it may help those with breathing difficulties. If leg swelling becomes noticeable, try to elevate it and reduce pressure, but follow up with a doctor as soon as you land.' Doctors mentioned that PE is preventable, and that simple awareness and preparation can save lives. 'People don't think of air travel as a health hazard,' said Dr Marian. 'But for some, it can trigger serious complications. A short check-up can make all the difference.'
Daily Mail
01-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Doctor issues warning about wearing common clothing item on flights
You might want to think twice before reaching for leggings or tight jeans the next time you fly, as experts have revealed the popular clothing items may be some of the worst things to wear on a plane. It's pretty common for passengers boarding major airlines like American Airlines , United, and Southwest to throw on a comfy pair of leggings or some cute jeans, but now, they have been urged to reconsider their travel fashion. A doctor recently spoke out about the dangers of donning tight clothes while flying to Huffington Post . 'The clothing we wear when we fly can significantly impact our circulation,' Dr. Hugh Pabarue, a vein specialist with Metro Vein Centers, explained. 'For example, tight clothing is not recommended. Wearing leggings and other restrictive garments such as skinny jeans that are too tight reduces blood's ability to flow into and out of the legs.' He explained that wearing skin-tight outfits while you're seated for hours in a cramped cabin can restrict circulation, leading to swollen legs, numbness, or worse - deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a dangerous condition where blood clots form in the legs. 'Wearing clothes that are too tight can potentially lead to conditions like compartment syndrome or meralgia paresthetica, causing numbness, tingling, and severe leg pain,' added Dr. Pabarue. Aviation specialist Christine Negroni also agreed with the clothing warning, and in addition to the health risks, she added that leggings pose another problem if there's ever an emergency on board. She pointed out that in the event of a fire, wearing leggings, which are made from synthetic fibers, could result in worse burns. 'The issue with leggings is the nature of the material,' Negroni told Huffington Post. 'You have a tight garment that is usually made from synthetic fibers, made from petroleum products, which is not something you want to wear on an airplane. 'The largest risk in a survivable air accident is fire.' '[The material of leggings] is going to get very hot, it will either melt on your skin or cause serious burns, and that becomes something that will impact your ability to escape the aircraft,' she added. 'In other words, if you're not damaged beyond [the] ability to exit, to get out of the airplane, then you might be affected by the fire.' One flight attendant previously went viral after she shared clothes that she advises against while flying. First, Rydell claimed you should never fly in 'shorts or crop tops' because its gets very cold on a flight. Explaining further in the caption, she wrote: 'Shorts or crop tops - ever felt the wrath of plane AC [air conditioning] on bare thighs or on your naked belly? Brutal.' Next, the flight attendant revealed why flip flops should be avoided at all costs when traveling. She wrote: 'Flip flops - fine for the beach, not for running to your gate or emergency landings. Plus, I know you will take them off during the flight and walk barefoot.' Similarly to Negroni, the air hostess also explained that tights should not be worn when flying, as she explained that they could be a safety hazard if there was a fire onboard. She said: 'Tights [are] synthetic = flammable. Not what you want in case of fire [as the] fabric might burn into your skin.' Back in April, a travel expert revealed what the most comfortable and stylish clothes are to wear to the airport. Having layers you can easily chuck off and on is vital for running to the boarding gate or settling down for a nap at 34,000 feet, she detailed. She suggested items such as slip-on sneakers, T-shirts, lounge sets, button-up shirts, and long cotton dresses.
