During the Soccer World Cup, you may have noticed that soccer players are fond of “heading” (hitting the ball with their noggins.) But often, they only hit other players’ heads.
So noses often suffer, with some soccer players repeatedly breaking their noses.
American color commentators, being NFL-loving Americans, often wondered when or if some type of protective headgear may be used in soccer games.
Now, a professional plastic surgery magazine has added even more fuel to the fire for protective soccer headgear.
Writing in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery-Global, an international professional magazine for cosmetic plastic surgeons, Dov Charles Goldenberg, M.D. and a group of plastic surgeons looked at soccer players who had surgery for broken noses and face fractures from 2000 to 2013.
(Read the plastic surgeons’ report.)
Of 45 professional soccer playing patients, 44 were male with an average age of 28. Sixteen suffered nasal bone fractures; seven had jaw bone injuries, six had injuries to the bone surrounding the eye and one had frontal and naso-orbitoethmoid fractures. Fifteen required no surgery.
Most injuries required open surgery and use of plates and screws to hold bones in place. Nose fractures required repositioning the nasal bones and splinting the nose.
An average of five days in the hospital was noted with another six to eight weeks of downtime for healing.
The important finding: 39 injuries were caused by collisions with other players. A soccer ball hitting a face only injured six.
The researchers noted the pros could afford hospitalization, but many other injured soccer players could not. So many noses broken in school yards were treated with aspirin and over-the-counter painkillers.
Unknown to lower level soccer players, however, is the fact that a broken nose has 10 days for treatment before it starts to heal in place. Not only do such noses usually end up twisted, but extreme breathing issues are caused.
(Learn more about functional breathing issues.)
Actually, there is a broken nose timetable. Certain adverse things happen to a broken nose on a fairly fixed schedule.
Worst of all: blood breaking through the nasal lining and surrounding the septum, (the thin partition of cartilage and bone separating the two nostrils), can damage the septum because of the pressure. Then, the patient has real problems.
(Read more about the broken nose timetable.)
So, you’ve got to wonder: in the near future, will soccer players take the field wearing NFL-style helmets?