Medicine hard to swallow

FOOTBALL FOCUS

Anyone who takes more than a passing interest in football will this week have become aware of the contribution a placenta will be making to Arsenal Football Club's bid to win the English Premier League title.

Robin van Persie

Under the magnificent headline "Van Persie's a Placenta Forward!" the Daily Mirror (and every other news journal on the planet) picked up on striker Robin van Persie's proposed visit to a Serbian housewife who offers a novel treatment for sporting injuries.

Marian Kovacevic is said to rub fluid from a cow or horse's placenta on the affected area (in van Persie's case his sprained ankle), and she is said to achieve remarkable results. Dutchman van Persie was told about her by teammate Orlando Engelaar, who recounted the tale of another former Feyenoord team-mate, Danko Lazovic.

Serbian Lazovic is said to have more than halved his recovery time from a hamstring injury after his placenta treatment, while an Ajax striker, Marko Pantelic, claims to have been in action eight days after suffering a thigh injury which would ordinarily have seen him sidelined for a month.

"She is vague about her methods," admitted van Persie. "But I know that she first massages you for a long time with placenta fluid. I am going to give it a try. It can't do any harm and if it helps, it helps. I've been in contact with Arsenal's chief physio about it. The club has allowed me to have this treatment done."

One can fully understand Arsenal's desire to have van Persie back in action as soon as possible. The Dutchman has scored eight times this season and been a central figure for the EPL's top goal scorers. If he is sidelined for seven weeks, as is normally the case with his injury, he would miss matches against Chelsea, Liverpool and Aston Villa, as well as well as the "revenge" League Cup encounter with Emmanuel Adebayor and Manchester City.

But placenta? Really?

While we know that in the animal kingdom mothers routinely eat the placenta to help them recover from the exertion of birth, human applications of placenta treatment range from the weird to the wonderful. There are anti-ageing creams on the market that use sheep placenta cells, practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine dry and pound placenta into powder to be drunk by children who are ill and Turkish researchers claim to have found that injecting placenta cells into rabbits helped them recover from fractures.

Doctors have been quick to comment on this alternative therapy as applied to torn ankle ligaments. Most have concluded that Kovacevic's "results" owe more to the so-called "placebo effect" than anything else. Van Persie has accordingly been bracketed with those new parents who dine on "Mummy's placenta" shortly after the arrival of a child and Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey, who buried his partner's placenta in an orchard following the birth of the couple's son last year.

But that's Hollywood, isn't it? The super-professional modern-day football environment is not one normally associated with bongo drum-beating weirdness. The term "sports science" exists for a very good reason: the science of sporting medicine and treatment is one which, by necessity, has made huge advances in recent years.

Clubs and national teams invest massively in players in a bid to gain results and accordingly do their best to ensure those "assets" are available for use as often as possible. Hence Wayne Rooney's use of an oxygen chamber to help speed his recovery from a broken foot in time for the 2006 World Cup.

So-called "blood-spinning", wherein small samples of an athlete's blood are spun in a centrifuge to increase the concentration of growth hormones, then injected into the wound, is said to shorten healing time by as much as five times.

When Chelsea recommended that treatment to injured players four seasons ago, the world's anti-doping authorities expressed concerns that non-natural elements could also be introduced into the players' bodies.

As for the actual spinning process, well the science behind it looks 100% solid, and is proven to aid recovery.

It is, however, far less "exotic" than several other "alternative" recovery methods employed by footballers over the years.

A German medic, Dr Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wolfhart has long claimed that an extract from the crest of cockerels called Hylart can lubricate injured knees, and prescribes injections of goats' blood for hamstring problems. Among his clients over the years have been Michael Owen, Jurgen Klinsmann and Arjen Robben.

When Gerard Houllier was in charge at Liverpool, he advocated a radical treatment for up-coming star Steven Gerrard, who was suffering crippling groin and back problems: he had a French dentist remove Stevie G's wisdom teeth. Et voila! Problem solved.

Chelsea winger Florent Malouda and even van Persie himself have since sat in the dentist's chair to ease muscular pains.

One wonders how long it will be before footballers emulate British marathon runner Paula Radcliffe who made an amazing recovery after a nasty crash with a cyclist left her cut and bruised. She took a traditional Australian aboriginal cure and applied an oil extracted from the backs of emus, which is said to ease pain and aid recovery.

Lastly, while not strictly being a treatment for injuries, it is worth pointing out that several South American clubs and national teams have taken to prescribing Viagra to their players when they have to play matches at high altitude, of say more than 3,500 metres above sea level. The reasoning is that the drug is designed to improve blood flow.

One suspects, however, that EPL clubs will not be jumping on that particular bandwagon any time soon. When all is said and done, there is science and then there is sheer lunacy.

Catch John Dykes on ESPN's Football Focus every Tuesday and First Edition on Friday.