Luka Doncic Reveals The Truth About Spain and Gives Hamstring Update - Doctor Explains

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]After speculation and some scrutiny from certain members of the media, Luca Donuchas talked to the press today for the first time since suffering his hamstring injury. And we're going to dive into the key details of the truth about why he went to Spain for his treatment. Welcome back everybody. I'm Dr. Brian Sudter and the goal on the channel is to teach more about the medical side of the sports world. Now, we haven't given any updates here since what we saw initially happen with Luca, but this is very important because he reveals the exact treatment that he had.

[00:00:26]And there are some things that I think could have been potentially optimized or improved. So, let's take a listen.

[00:00:33]>> How are you feeling?

[00:00:33]>> Uh, feeling good. Uh, you know, obviously this is a different injury that >> I'll say Luca's now about four weeks out from his injury. Grade two hamstring strain.

[00:00:42]>> Yeah, I'm running. Uh, right now I'm running. Uh, but I haven't done any contact. I haven't >> This is a really important detail about his state. He's running but no on court stuff. But running is a big key part here. And so hearing that he's already running, I think this truly could be 1 to two weeks before we see him back.

[00:00:57]>> I did the MRI on the hamstring, you know, and the doctor told me at the beginning. Uh so, you know, >> key detail there, they told him 8 weeks and so starting to ramp up some running by four. He's actually maybe a little bit ahead of schedule based on that initial 8week timeline.

[00:01:15]>> Yeah, I went to Spain to do PRP. You know, it's obviously every everybody knows uh that's in this that it's one of the best countries to do that.

[00:01:24]>> Yeah, I'd argue with that a little bit.

[00:01:26]We'll come back to it. So, PRP stands for plateletri plasma. It's what we consider an orthobiologic injection.

[00:01:32]It's an injection of cells, tissue from your own body into the sight of an injury, into a sight of pain to try to help speed up recovery, facilitate recovery, but also to manage pain and manage symptoms. We all knew that Luca had gone to Spain for some sort of biologic injection. I think the speculation from Winhorst about like why he was really there. It is very clear in the sports medicine world that the regulations around what you can inject, what cell products, what treatments are available because of government regulations is different in Europe than it is in the United States. That doesn't mean that one is necessarily better than the other. It just means that one is different. And so there are other things you have access to, probably more you have access to over in Europe. And so to hear it was specifically PRP is very key because now we can actually look at the data in the literature and say number one was PRP the right thing to do and number two what does the data actually show about how PRP may facilitate or speed up recovery. We'll dive into those scientific details to teach you more about it and maybe PRP is something for your own muscle injuries. But first I want to give a quick shout out to the sponsor of this video. Poor gut health is one of the most underdisussed blockers of long-term performance. And the sponsor of today's video, Momentus, is here to help change that for you with their fiber plus fiber supplement.

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[00:03:47]Let's get back to our learning. So, like I said, PRP stands for plateletri plasma. Essentially, what you do, you draw blood from the arm, you spin that blood in a centrifuge machine, and what that does is it separates out the different components of the blood. The main thing that you get from it is the plateletri plasma contains all the platelets in the blood that have been concentrated down. And those platelets are cells in your blood that contain these various signaling molecules, growth factors that when injected into the sight of an injury or into your body. Those platelets release those growth factor products, those cytoines, and they influence the signaling of cells in the tissue that you are injecting and trying to treat. PRP is not some new revolutionary thing. It's been used regularly in the orthopedics world for honestly probably the last like 15 to 20 years. It also importantly is not something that you need to go to Spain for. The PRP is available well understood as kind of the bread and butter of any upto-date sports medicine doc in the United States. By far the doctors with the Lakers have access to people who are great with PRP injections. So I do think it's interesting to find out that Luca went to Europe for something that he very easily could have gotten. and I'd argue just as good here in the United States.

[00:05:00]What's important though is it's it's good to be somewhere where you feel comfortable, which he does mention in the video. I I don't think there is anything about PRP done in Europe that is inferior to PRP done in the United States. The hard part though is you will find a lot of places in the United States, in Europe, wherever, who do PRP in different ways, and so it's important to go to somebody who has some academic training, somebody who does a lot of them to understand the differences in how to formulate the PRP. high white blood cells, low white blood cells, the exact dose of platelets that's needed, the treatment strategy, the post treatment protocol. There's a lot around PRP that makes it good. And so, it's not so much the country that you're in. It's who's doing it. So, yes, the person doing it in Spain might be fantastic compared to the average person in the United States, but there are plenty of more than capable, very good physicians here in the United States that can do PRP. So, by no means do you need to go to Europe for PRP. And obviously, you know, we talked with the Lakers doctors, so everybody agree uh for me to go there. Uh obviously, I know he trusts a lot some people from from Spain that I used to work.

[00:06:04]>> That's the key point, right? Luca was with Real Madrid. Like he knows the people there. He trusts them. And having that trust is a very important part of your recovery. Somebody might be able to offer the greatest thing since sliced bread for your treatment, but if you do not trust them, if you don't have confidence in them, it's going to set you up for a bad ultimate outcome and a bad recovery period >> before. Uh but why I was in space so long is because I needed 4 days in between every shot. Uh so I did it four times. So that's why I stay longer.

[00:06:30]>> Now this is where things are very different and where I would love to hear the opinion of the doctor who did his PRP because this is not the traditional approach to do PRP for a muscle injury.

[00:06:47]And there might actually be something that's better than PRP that we can do here in the United States that they may or may not have really come to the literature yet to do over in Europe or they just don't agree with it. We need to look at our biodigital anatomy tool to understand the different locations of a muscle and why certain cell-based products might be better than others. So whenever you injure your hamstring, right, you can have it in different locations. You can have a tear up at the tendon origin, right? Where the tendon comes off the isial tuberosity or where the tendon inserts down on the fibula at the knee. More commonly the biceps forous is going to be a true intramuscular injury. But you can have more involvement up near the myotenous junction or a pure tendon injury. That is different because when it comes to what cell product we inject, the two that you will commonly see in the United States are going to be PRP and PPP. PRP plateletri plasma, PPP, platelet poor plasma. We traditionally thought of the platelet pore plasma as the kind of waste product of making PRP, but then some basic science research show that it might actually be better for trying to help encourage the biologic process of muscle healing compared to PRP. And so when I'm doing PRP, PPP for muscle injuries, it depends on where the injury is located. If it's a pure muscle injury, I will often do just platelet pore plasma. If it's near the myotendinous junction where the muscle joins up with the tendon, I will add plateletri to that area. And if it's purely in the tendon, we have way more data on tendon injuries with plateletri plasmos. So I'll put PRP up at the tendon origin. And we have actual data like in patients that we can back up this practice. A lot of this work in the United States has come from Ryan Cruz, who's a sports medicine physician at Iowa, looking at studies of comparing platelet poor versus plateletri plasma for acute thigh muscle injuries. And in this particular study of thigh injuries, 100 patients, young healthy individuals who had either PRP or PPP, the platelet poor plasma had a faster return to sport than the plateletri plasma. basically suggesting that that platelet poor plasma is potentially doing more to help encourage that muscle healing and regrowth of those muscle fibers and push along that biology compared to the plateletri that we traditionally used to do. Really the theory for why there might be a difference is because of the different growth factors and the different signaling molecules that you find in PRP versus PPP. What you're trying to do with all these injections is push along the normal biologic process. And so you want to optimize what the body is already trying to do and not steer it in a different direction. And so what we don't want to do is use these injections to steer the body down a different path of where it doesn't want to go. We want to encourage it down the path that it's going to naturally go. And we think that maybe the plate pore plasma has a better sort of growth factor millu better growth factor soup that can show more myoblast muscle cell differentiation. Whereas PRP tends to be more myobblast pipheration potentially favoring more scar tissue over muscle. And so coming back to everything with Luca, the one point where I think you might argue a difference is with whether or not plateletri plasma or platelet poor plasma would have been better. I will say though it's fair this is very much in like the earlier stages of research.

[00:10:11]We only have a handful of studies directly comparing the two and so I don't think this is conclusive and you have to remember that people are going to do what they're familiar with doing.

[00:10:19]If you go to a physician who has been doing PRP for muscle injuries, and you will find there's some really good NFL data that took athletes with a hamstring strain, gave them PRP, compared it without PRP, and the PRP group did better. And so there is a precedent out there of data showing that PRP can accelerate hamstring strain healing and also reduce recurrence risk on the order of like multiple weeks. And so it is enough of an impact that I think it is worth doing when you have the resources.

[00:10:45]But if you're going somewhere where they've got 15 years of experience with what to expect with PRP, it makes sense that they're going to do that rather than tell Luca, hey, you know, there's this new thing. I haven't really done it yet, but let's do it and see what happens. You're going to go off of what's been established as sort of your precedent, your go-to approach that you know has worked. And so, I don't think you can fault the doctors in Spain for doing something that has much more historic precedence and in their hands likely more success. Arguably, I would say that Luca is probably ahead of schedule. Honestly, if they told him this is a twomonth injury and he's already running at four weeks, that's encouraging. He truly might be back in two weeks and have taken that 8week injury down to a six week injury, which would be a massive success with that injection. Now, you're not going to take something that's a two-month injury and make it a 3-week injury. There's nothing on earth that exists that's going to do that. You cannot speed up biology that quickly and do it safely. But taking something and reducing it by maybe 15 20% in terms of return to play time definitely possible and a realistic goal to shoot for. The other thing I'll say here he talked about how he was there because he had to do like multiple injections 4 days apart. That is not the standard approach used here in the US.

[00:11:56]Here in the US with a PRP injection, especially for muscle, it's a it's a one-time shot for most of us. What I don't want to do is cause new trauma to the muscle tissue over the course of two weeks by continuing to stick a needle in it. I want to get those growth factors in there. Let the body do its thing and then not disturb the tissue when I personally am doing it. So that part is something that I'm not doing in my practice. I'm not familiar with. We didn't do that where I trained. Again, doesn't mean it wrong. It just means it's a different approach of doing it.

[00:12:24]And somebody who wants to get up here and like grandstand and argue that they were like amateurs over there or did something like wasting his time to me is complete lunacy, complete nonsense. PRP very scientifically established appropriate thing to do to help speed up hamstring muscle injuries. Is the data 100% conclusive? No. But it's not 100% conclusive with hardly anything we do in the orthopedic world. You're going to go somewhere where you're comfortable.

[00:12:50]Check. Real Madrid. You're going to have somebody do it who has done a lot of them. Check the people over there. And you're going to rely on their experience with how they have done it. They're not going to do some one-off random thing that they've not done before. Even though a new study might suggest it could be a little bit better. If I were treating Luca, I would be a little bit nervous to do plate port plasma too just because like you're kind of still feeling it out. I would want to have more experience doing them. I would offer it. I would talk about the literature suggesting it may be better.

[00:13:18]I would certainly put it on the table as a possibility and then help let the athlete decide what we're going to do.

[00:13:24]So nothing about this story is crazy. I I think everybody's like, "Well, it's terrible. Luca had to come out and share this. Who cares?" like if it's going to bring more awareness to these other treatments and provide more education, then I'd say go for it. I don't know if necessarily he needed to be in Europe, right? I mean, like I said, we have very good access to these same treatments here in the United States. The literature is there to back up doing it.

[00:13:47]Even if it only shaves off a couple of weeks, 10 days, that would be considered a success. And it honestly sounds like he's on a good trajectory where he might be able to get back in a couple of weeks. You got to think of the progression to go from running to playing basketball. Now, if he's just jogging up and down the court, okay, maybe more like two to three. If he's like sprinting, running, getting in a hard workout, I definitely think we could see him back in 7 to 14 days, that sequence of ramp up and progression sounds very appropriate. So, that's it for the video, everybody. Let me know as always questions or comments down below.

[00:14:20]And until next time, we'll see you later.