Doctors: Phillips' condition career-threatening
Photo credit: Newsday/Photo by Howard Schnapp | New York Giants no. 21 Kenny Phillips during the first day of mini camp at their new practice facility. (June 16, 2009)
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Kenny Phillips' best game in the NFL might also have been his last.
Several orthopedic specialists told Newsday that patellofemoral arthritis is a serious enough condition to not only sideline the Giants' second-year safety for the rest of this season but perhaps jeopardize his future in the league. "To me," Dr. Craig Levitz said, "this is a career-threatening injury."
Levitz, a physician for the PGA Tour and member of the Major League Baseball Panel of Physicians, went so far as to say that having Phillips tear both his MCL and ACL would be better than this diagnosis.
"We can fix those," he said. "Arthritis, we can't fix that."
Although surgery or microsurgery are options, those will alleviate some of the pain and swelling for a time but will not correct the problem.
"It doesn't bode well for a football player to have this," orthopedic surgeon Michael Kaplan said. "It's very unusual, and he may have had a traumatic injury where he got smashed in the kneecap. If it's severe enough to require microfracture surgery, it's a worrisome circumstance. It's not an overnight get-well situation, and the results are somewhat less predictable than ligament or cartilage tears."
One Giants source said the team does not consider it career-threatening. But they aren't discounting the severity of it, either. "It's serious stuff," the source said. "Success rates on procedures are much better now than a few years ago."
Phillips' agent, Drew Rosenhaus, wrote on his Twitter page: "After discussing Kenny Phillips' medical situation with several specialists, the future prognosis is very positive. Furthermore, this injury will not have a significant impact on Kenny's NFL career."
One course of action would be to strengthen the quadriceps and other muscles around the knee to better support the joint, but that would not repair the condition. "You can't stop it from progressing; you just have to hope it doesn't progress," Levitz said. "Arthritis only goes in one direction. It only gets worse; it never gets better."
Phillips and the Giants still are mulling how to treat the situation. "The reason why they're probably weighing their options is not because they don't know what to do," Levitz said. "It's because they are trying to pick the best option for him with no good option. There's no option that will give him an extremely high chance of feeling a lot better."
