Sports medicine has advanced far beyond expectations these past years. When I was playing sports, if you happened to sprain your ankle, the coach’s advice was to "walk it off."
And normally, the ankle was better after a few minutes. Then came the advice to put ice on it, which is still the accepted method of treatment for a lot of muscle and tendon injuries.
When a pitcher hurt his elbow the conventional wisdom was to rest. If the arm didn’t get better, the pitcher learned to be "crafty" or wound up in the Southern Minny.
Then a left-hander by the name of Tommy John blew out his elbow and a radical new surgery was proposed. A ligament would be taken from another part of the body and put in the elbow. It worked and is now a common operation. Some pitchers come back from surgery throwing harder than before .
The next step is on the horizon. Our neighbor, the Mayo Clinic, has given priority to Regenerative Medicine. According to a Rochester Post Bulletin article, the clinic has figured out how to take simple skin cells and make it possible for them to grow new tissue in an organ.
For example, they might replace damaged tissue in a heart. If this comes about in the next decade or two, how far behind is tendon regeneration?
But, with what I have concluded, I have found that Mayo Clinic is pretty conservative. It seems to me the clinic would not be headed down this road unless they foresaw a positive outcome.
Wow, what a huge impact on our society, but for now let’s stick with athletics. If a baseball player loses some of his keen eyesight, that could probably be fixed.
Athletic concerns would probably play a very small role in the overall objectives of regenerative medicine, but let’s use them for an example. A Joe Mauer could probably play long after he would normally have to hang up his spikes.
If this were possible and from a layman’s viewpoint, and it looks like it would, who would be eligible for regenerative medicine? In order to qualify, would you have to bat .300 and hit 30 home runs? Be a 20-game winner if you were a pitcher?
Who would decide? Baseball fans? Sports fans? U.S. citizens? Might you have to pay $10 in order to vote on a particular player? Would their club decide? Or maybe it would be done with money. Could the player afford it? Could he borrow the money against future earnings? Would this favor the rich player over the poor?
These options would certainly favor the male athlete over the female. Is that fair?
These questions can go on and on, as can the answers. And, if a book hasn’t been already written about these question, I’m sure one will be.
Regenerative Medicine will be a huge new challenge for the human race. The ethics involved are many and varied.
If the procedure is limited, who will determine those eligible? For example, let’s assume a repaired heart will not be cheap. Can just rich people afford it? Can we have insurance for it and if we can, would Obamacare cover it? Will it be limited to the most intelligent? Will it just be available to those benefitting civilization and if so, who determines the benefit? This is just the very tip of the bio-ethical questions that will be raised.
The Mayo Clinic includes in its research a bio-ethics committee. They certainly have their work cut out for them.
