I agree that the more time you take to recover, the stronger you will make you knee, but I also completely disagree with your implication that these doctors and the team would send Fabbri out on the ice before his specific case was ready to go. That's my point.
My ACL was healed, and doctors are going to clear an athlete before the knee is ready. If they do, that's a doctor to never go to. But, like I said, anecdotal evidence like that is pointless, I brought my experience up just to highlight that.
Now, there are times where advice from the doctors is ignored, but in a scenario like this, it doesn't make any sense to ignore the advice of a doctor.
I think we're in agreement in general, it's just the details where our opinions differ. I don't think the doctors sent him out there before he was ready, I'm saying because he's a professional athlete with a timetable they may have put him out there before the optimal time which increased his change at re-injury.
And regarding your ACL, I'm glad you didn't re-injure it at 6 months, but your graft wasn't 100% healed at that point. It's not my opinion, that's just a fact. Any medical study will tell you it takes an ACL graft 7-9 months at a minimum. It was obviously strong enough and your surrounding muscles were strong enough to support it, but the graft was definitely not as strong as it would've been at 8-9 months. How significantly stronger would it have been is the question.
The average time for an NHL player to return to play from an ACL tear is just under 8 months. That means they were skating and cleared for contact significantly before that. You can argue that Fabbri was back fast, but he was right on the average. He would also have had multiple scans and physicals to make sure the knee was ready.
Could we have waited longer and reduced the chance of the injury reoccurring? Yes, but we are probably talking about taking a 3% chance down to a 1-2% chance.
People have lots of preconceptions about knee injuries because they are getting their information from across various sports. An ACL tear to an NFL linebacker is potentially career ending for a variety of reasons. An ACL tear to an NHL player is typically 7-9 months out and largely picking up where his career left off.
If people are wanting to attribute blame for the injury, then look at our own medical staff choosing not to take swelling in the knee seriously enough to get a scan done.
I'm not blaming the doctors, I just think it's smarter to wait the additional 1-2 months to get to the optimal stage of graft recovery before returning to full contact.
I agree that chance of ACL re-injury is very sport specific. I did mine playing soccer which along with football have the highest chance of ACL injury. Hockey is better due to less abrupt change of directions as well as less friction between the foot and the ground.
The swelling issue not being taken seriously does surprise me. Something like a microfracture could still cause swelling significantly mid to long term but an ACL graft should cause swelling that long after surgery. That should have been an immediate red flag.
Does anyone know why he went with Bach for his surgeon? Not saying it has anything to do with it, but I thought the Wash U group was the typical Blues surgeons and physicians? One of the Blues physicians (Brophy) is the one that did my ACL and microfracture surgery.