The ‘Jock Doc’ : Chiropractor Draws Upon Athletic Past to Diagnose Injuries

Dr. Frank Bredice, a Sherman Oaks chiropractor known around town as the “jock doc” for his athlete-heavy practice, was listening to a Hollywood stunt man complain about pain in his lower back. To Bredice, diagnosis is very much like unraveling a mystery. He was looking for clues to the root cause of the bad back, no matter how seemingly unrelated or obscure.

The fact that the stunt man crashed cars for a living led to the elementary deduction that he must have visited an emergency room sometime during his career. Bredice learned that the stunt man never went to a hospital for an injured back, but he did wind up in intensive care once when he missed the landing cushion after a 20-foot fall and fractured an ankle.

Bredice immediately made a connection. He thought back to his days as a world-class hammer thrower. His career had been cut short by a bad back, which, he later learned, had been brought about by a broken ankle. Mystery solved. Like Bredice’s, the stunt man’s back had been a victim of altered gait. Bredice later confirmed this by using slow-motion, stop-action videotape of the stunt man walking.

“A lot of diagnosis is intuitive and an educated guess,” said Bredice, a tall, powerful man with curly hair and an easy manner. “But sometimes, all I have to do to figure out what’s wrong with someone is think back to similar things that happened to me during my own athletic career. I’m the most messed up athlete I know. Aside from the back, I could have really hurt myself with all the mistakes I used to make.”

When Bredice (pronounced bree-DEE-chee) was an All-American in track at the University of Southern Connecticut in the early ‘70s, he didn’t have the benefit of the information available today in nutrition and training techniques. He would do standard sit-ups, holding a 100-pound weight behind his head (“I should have gone straight to the hospital,” he said). He would drink 30 glasses of milk a night (“lots of nutrients but three-quarters empty calories”).

Bredice also flirted with real danger when he took steroids. “Practically all the athletes I knew took them--whatever was around,” he said. “But we didn’t know better then. Nobody knew the downside.”

Bredice was lucky. He didn’t suffer liver damage or acquire excess body hair and acne, nor did he have to explain enlarged breasts to his friends. But he did inflate from 265 to 310 pounds, and he thinks steroids might have contributed to the bad back because they weaken ligaments.

“I can say unequivocally, I would not take steroids today,” Bredice, 39, said. But he wonders about athletes who would risk their health for a shot at glory. “Somebody took a survey of top athletes,” he said. “They were asked if they would continue taking steroids if they knew they would win an Olympic gold medal but die in five years. Ninety percent said yes.”

Before back problems, Bredice probably would have done just about anything to reach the top. He was enjoying his life style on the world track circuit and could see himself continuing it past college. He said he was “perfectly content with being a broke amateur athlete.”

Bredice said throwing the hammer is his favorite pastime. Strangely enough, he joined the track team only to get out of spring football practice at Southern Connecticut, a Division II school with what Bredice calls “a long lineage of good hammer throwers.”

By the time Bredice graduated in June, 1972, he was beating Division I competition by whipping the 16-pound ball more than 230 feet, a distance that “stinks,” he said, compared to marks of 240 feet or better outside the United States. He also was acquiring enough medals, plaques and certificates to eventually decorate an entire wall of his office.

In 1972, he won the U.S. Olympic trials in the hammer throw but never made it to Munich. After competing in an indoor meet before the Games, he felt a twinge in his back. He thought it was a muscle spasm, but the pain didn’t go away. Doctors weren’t sure what was wrong and first tried treating the injury with enzyme injections. A year later, in desperation, he underwent a five-hour exploratory operation for what doctors wrongly thought were two herniated discs.

While the operation failed to improve his back, which is still unstable, it did spark an interest in the healing arts. Although he had acquired a Ph.D. in nutrition, Bredice needed a career. Nutrition experts, he said, usually wind up selling vitamins for pharmaceutical companies. So Bredice decided to become a chiropractor. Choosing between schools in Chicago and Los Angeles in the middle of winter wasn’t difficult.

In 1980, Bredice graduated with honors from L.A. College of Chiropractic. The year before, he began treating a lot of high school athletes from Glendale and La Canada who came to the La Canada clinic where he trained as an intern. Bredice also met a lot of body builders in the gyms where he worked out. The body builders later would become patients, and one of them, Spice Williams, was also a stunt woman. She began referring the stunt professionals to Bredice.

Today, Bredice estimates that half his business consists of athletes and stunt men, and the L.A. Weekly recently named him the “best jock doc” in its annual “Best of L.A.” issue. Aside from treating Raiders and Rams and other professional athletes, Bredice also tends to several show biz luminaries.

While not all his patients can hum the melody to “Valley Girl” while he’s popping their vertebra, Bredice does treat people who have a lot in common, most notably those with chronic, high-impact injuries caused by running or aerobics. Joints and ligaments, Bredice said, are just not built to take constant pounding on pavement or the gym floor.

“Runners are the hardest patients to treat,” Bredice. “They’re addicted to running. It’s hard for me to get them to stop. They love to get out there. Their endorphins kick in and they get runner’s high even though their back hurts, their knees ache and they have headaches.

“It’s also hard for me to get women to stop doing aerobics for the same reasons. I treat a lot of aerobics instructors and see a lot of stress fractures in their feet, legs and pelvis, particularly in thin women.”

Bredice keeps his patients mechanically sound by using applied physiology, acupressure, computer analysis and such nutritional boosters as raw glandulars (like adrenal tissue), amino acids (“the biggest advancement in nutrition in the last three years”) and metabolic treatments like selenium and zinc that change function on the cellular level.

“Athletes are more aware of nutrition today than ever, and some are very aware, but in general,” Bredice said, most of them are as naive as he was 20 years ago.

“Here’s an example of what I’m seeing,” Bredice said, leaning back on a black leather chair in his white office. “A national judo champion comes in and wonders why he has no energy and strength and gets heart palpitations. I find out his diet consists of three Cokes for breakfast, lots of coffee, fast-food lunches, six candy bars a day.

“And this isn’t a rare example. I see it often.”

For clients who either do not have an exercise program or want to quit running and aerobics, Bredice recommends a workout that includes stretching (“but not overstretching--you should not have pain”), safe abdominal crunches (“abdominals keep the spine aligned”) and weight training.

For aerobic exercise, Bredice advocates brisk walking for 20 minutes at least six times a week. And don’t, he says, be like the guy who parks as close to the health club as possible to avoid a long walk.

Despite all the health problems now associated with working out, Bredice still is “a firm believer in exercise.” But do it right, he says, or the next mystery he solves will be yours.