re: OT Medical Drs - How egregious is misdiagnosising a broken leg as a bruise??

I can't imagine missing something that require surgery, that should be pretty obvious

A bone contusion (aka a bone bruise) and a low grade stress fracture can look the exact same on MRI and can be undetectable on X-Ray. Displaced fractures are pretty hard to miss. More details are needed in this situation.

Agreed TypoKing

If someone played a contact sport complains of pain in that leg. I'm gonna get an xray.

An obvious broken bone is very noticeable, even a non medical professional can tell. The questions are did they get an xray and was it not visible at the time. Was it just a bruise and worsened. A lot of question marks.

As stated, stress fractures can take weeks to show up. I don't know the story, or if he had an actual injury. An acute fracture would definitely show something. The fibula almost always has some displacement, even if slight.

Having said that, I can't imagine why you wouldn't just get an MRI on any football player with an injury. The cost is a drop in the bucket compared to missing something.

Happened to my elderly Mother In Law....was a nightmare.

With what I know (obviously not the full story), the Saints have unjustly publicly shamed the two orthopedists.

I'm curious what imaging Breaux had, but stress injuries or fractures can have negative X-rays and it can be difficult to differentiate between the 2 on MRIs (often the fracture line on the T1 images is hard to see for fibulas because of the image slice thickness). Most of the time, it just takes time to truly determine what's going on. Heck, he probably had a stress injury that converted to a fracture because the Saints were pushing him to get back on the field. If I'm one of these two orthopedists, I'm suing the Saints for defamation.

ETA: Just read Breaux's prior fibular fracture was internally fixated (aka he's got hardware). This makes an MR worthless because of artifact, and the sensitivity for fracture pickup on X-rays is much lower. I'm guessing initial X-rays were normal but follow-up films showed the fracture (like I said, time is the true decider). If this is correct, then no orthopedist would have done anything different than what happened.

Ouch

Repeal Obamacare now

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Depends on the X-ray and what it shows or does not show.

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If this is a hairline crack this is correct. Cracks in bone or steel show up on X-ray film as a thin line of "dark" due to the lack of density as compared to bone. Depending on the orientation of the crack, it is easily missed without additional exposures.

Now someone said "broken" fibula, that would not be missed.

Comments based on general knowledge of gamma ray radiography of welding...same principle. Radiography for cracks in steel welds are not an acceptable means of detection.