The NCAA’s chief medical officer said Friday that he will back off a plan to recommend a mandatory heart test for athletes at higher risk of cardiac death because of an outcry from university team doctors who oppose the practice.
Schools wouldn’t be obligated to follow such a recommendation, but legal experts and school officials said that declining to do so could place a school at risk of legal exposure if an athlete fell dead.
Hainline’s published comments prompted a group of some 100 university team physicians to sign a petition calling on him to change his mind. The tone of debate over the issue on an online listserv run by the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine became so contentious that the group shut down the conversation.
The issue “became a thunderstorm,” Hainline said. “I have become convinced that the infrastructure and knowledge base will not support this effort at present.”
Hainline said that he still hoped to get in place an NCAA recommendation for mandatory screening of athletes. But instead of unilaterally making the call—a strategy he hoped would help sidestep the NCAA’s bureaucracy—he will work to address critics’ concerns and to get support from the broader medical community. Opponents’ main worries, he said, are that schools lack infrastructure to carry out screening and that many team doctors lack the expertise to correctly read EKG results.
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal