Advisers to the FDA concluded a meeting Tuesday on the safety of breast implants. What’s emerged is a lack of scientific certainty about the risks implants pose to millions of women who have them.
Purdue Pharma, the maker of opioid OxyContin, has reached a $270 million civil settlement with the state of Oklahoma.
The Trump administration’s shift in a major legal case against the Affordable Care Act could lead to the reversal of the expansive law and far-reaching effects on all Americans’ health care.
After a sports injury, Esteban Serrano owed $829.41 for a knee brace purchased with insurance through his doctor’s office. He says he found the same kind of brace selling for less than $250 online.
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Paula Andalo/Kaiser Health News
Last October, Esteban Serrano wrenched his knee badly during his weekly soccer game with friends.
Serrano, a software engineer, grew up playing soccer in Quito, Ecuador, and he has kept up the sport since moving to the United States two decades ago.
He hobbled off the field and iced his knee. But the pain was so severe that he made an appointment with Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, a network of orthopedists practicing in Greater Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.
The doctor diagnosed a strain of the medial collateral ligament and prescribed over-the-counter pain medication as well as a hinged knee brace, which Serrano used for several weeks until he’d healed.
He expected his insurance to cover his treatment. A plan from a previous job had covered him when he needed surgery to fix a broken nose sustained in another soccer game in 2017.
Then the bill came.
Patient: Esteban Serrano, 41, a software engineer and father of two from Phoenixville, Pa., outside Philadelphia.
Total bill: $1,197. $210 for the office outpatient visit, $105 for an X-ray and $882 for a hinged knee brace, all billed by the orthopedic practice. His insurer, Aetna, covered the visit and the X-ray but only $52.59 of the cost of the brace. That left Serrano with a balance of $829.41.
Service provider: Rothman Orthopaedic Institute in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Medical service: A doctor examined Serrano’s knee and sent him for an X-ray. The doctor said he should use a knee brace for four weeks and recommended a hinged one sold through the practice.
What gives: A medial collateral ligament injury is a common knee injury occurring frequently among participants in contact sports. According to the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, the medial collateral ligament is involved in at least 42 percent of knee ligament injuries. Although most cases are sports related, such injuries can also result from everyday activities like tripping on stairs.
“The doctor told me that he thought I didn’t have damage, that it was more of an inflammation, but he ordered an MRI just to make sure,” said Serrano. (The MRI confirmed that suspicion.)
Serrano said the brace did ease the discomfort and stabilized his knee as it healed. However, the bill was almost more painful — he owed the orthopedic practice $829.41.
“You can find the same brace for less than $250 online,” he said.
Serrano, a software engineer, grew up playing soccer in Quito, Ecuador. After straining a medial collateral ligament, he got a brace to help it heal.
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Paula Andalo/Kaiser Health News
The bill came close to Christmas, when Serrano’s 12-year-old daughter wanted her first iPhone. “I told her, ‘Sorry, honey, but I already paid a price of an iPhone for the hinged knee brace,’ ” Serrano joked.
Serrano emphasized that he felt lucky to have the money to handle a bill that for many people could equal a month’s rent or three months of groceries.
Knee braces fall into a category of products called “durable medical equipment,” whose prices can vary widely. Items range from slings and braces to wheelchairs and commodes. They also include glucose meters and breast pumps for new mothers.
Doctors and hospitals that dispense such equipment for patients to take home almost always bill for them and add hefty markups that can catch patients unaware.
Braces and other products “are often marked up two or three times what the cost is, and unfortunately, that is the standard practice,” said Dr. Matthew Matava, an orthopedic surgeon and chief of sports medicine for Washington University Physicians in St. Louis.
Rothman Orthopaedic didn’t respond to requests for comments.
The type of hinged knee brace Serrano bought was a DonJoy Playmaker. DonJoy is one of the nation’s largest producers of braces. A customer service representative for the company said it charges a retail price of $242.51 for the model that Serrano got. Serrano paid more than three times that price.
In an emailed statement about the case, an Aetna spokesman wrote that “while the cost of a knee brace, or any other health care service, is determined by the negotiated rate between the health care provider and the health plan, the starting point is the charge from the health care provider.”
It is not even clear that such an elaborate knee brace was needed for Serrano’s injury.
Dr. Elizabeth Matzkin, chief of women’s sports medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said that while it is helpful to give patients some kind of knee brace for support after medial collateral ligament injuries, the use of a hinged knee brace does not influence recovery, according to studies. She called hinged braces “luxury products.” Simpler, cheaper braces also offer support.
Resolution: Serrano recalled that when he received the brace, an employee showed him a form with its estimated cost in writing. He remembered his share was more than $700, but he didn’t pay too much attention because he assumed his insurance would cover it.
After receiving the bill, he made several phone calls to the doctor’s practice to get a copy of the form he’d signed. It stated that the product could be returned within seven days. A month had already passed. Because he had not met his deductible, his $829.41 balance was even more than the estimate.
The takeaway: These days, many types of equipment dispensed by doctors’ offices or hospitals involve a charge. Don’t assume generosity. Ask the doctor to identify precisely what you need and explain why you need it.
When a doctor or hospital offers you a piece of equipment to help your healing, decide if you really need it or will use it. Say no if you won’t. Ask if you will be billed for it and how much.
Many items can be purchased at a fraction of the cost online or from a pharmacy just down the block.
Know your insurance plan’s copay or coinsurance for medical equipment (often 20 percent). The cost of purchasing the equipment yourself online may well be less than if you purchase through a medical office.
NPR produced and edited the interview with Kaiser Health News’ Elisabeth Rosenthal for broadcast.
Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that isn’t affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
After four Super Bowls and a record-breaking number of touchdowns, Rob Gronkowski says it’s time to retire. In a post online, the 29-year-old said he’s looking forward to what comes next.
Baseball’s opening day is right around the corner and one company will be paying close attention. Nokona is the last remaining glove maker that still produces the gloves in the U.S. for MLB players.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Baseball is back again. The first games of the regular season were played last week in Tokyo. America’s oldest professional sport has grown worldwide and the industry that supports it. But a tiny town in Texas is holding onto one tradition. KERA’s Bill Zeeble in Dallas takes us to the factory that’s still making gloves in the U.S. for major league baseball players.
BILL ZEEBLE, BYLINE: About a hundred miles northwest of Dallas-Fort Worth past pastures of crops and cattle sits Nocona, Texas, population 3,000, home to the Nokona baseball glove factory.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY WHIRRING)
ZEEBLE: Inside, stacks of tanned and dyed kangaroo, buffalo and calf skins are piled at one end of the 20,000-square-foot shop.
ROB STOREY: We literally bring leather in through one door. And magically, ball gloves come out the door at the very end – that and about 45 labor operations, then you’ve got a ball glove.
ZEEBLE: Rob Storey should know. He’s Nokona’s executive vice president. And this is the family business. To survive the depression, his grandfather Bob Storey added ball gloves to the family’s line of leather goods in 1934. Since then, just about every U.S. competitor has moved production overseas. Grandfather Bob, who died in 1980, said he’d rather quit and go fishing than import Nokonas.
STOREY: In some ways, we see it as a competitive advantage because we have people that understand the game of baseball. Our competitors are making them in factories. A lot of those factories – people have never even seen a baseball game or know what it is. Sure, it would be easy to go over there and do something. But that’s not who we are. We’re not about easy.
ZEEBLE: Nokona and it’s 75 employees are about making, marketing and selling their mostly handmade gloves in the town with the same name. The brand honors Comanche chief Peta Nocona. The company couldn’t legally use the city’s spelling, so Storey’s grandfather changed the C to a K. And its been spelled that way ever since. Martin Gomez has been Nocona’s master glove turner for 19 years. That’s a big deal because every glove is first sewn inside-out.
MARTIN GOMEZ: It’s not that hard. No, but it takes some time to learn, to get used to. Like, the first time you start to work, it give you a blister all over your hands. But you get used to it.
ZEEBLE: Storey says Gomez is modest. If he’s not careful, he can tear the leather and hand-stitching. Gomez slides a rod in each inside-out finger, pushes it hard against a wooden dowel and turns each leather finger back the right way. First, he sprays leather softener on the inside-out glove. Then, says Storey, he heats it on a 250-degree metal form.
STOREY: It’s very critical to do that so that you don’t rip out any of the seams while we’re going through this process because this process, in some ways, is more difficult on the glove than, actually, the game of baseball.
ZEEBLE: The game of baseball, after all, is what Nokona’s all about, even if it’s not nearly as well-known as giants like Rawlings or Wilson. In the youth market, though, it’s big.
ROBBY SCOTT: I grew up using a Nokona glove. My first glove that I ever really remember was a first baseman’s mitt that was a Nokona.
ZEEBLE: That’s Arizona relief pitcher Robby Scott. When we first talked long distance, he was with the Red Sox between World Series games. Nokona found him while searching for player endorsements. Scott says there’s just something special about it.
SCOTT: I will never wear a different glove. It’s a special bond that I have with them. They could have 200 players wearing their gloves. But to me, it seems special because they make it seem like I’m the only one.
ZEEBLE: And, says Storey, Nokona’s the only maker he knows of that’ll refurbish its old, tattered mitts. He says try that with a glove made overseas.
For NPR News, I’m Bill Zeeble in Nocona, Texas.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
NPR’s Scott Simon speaks with ESPN’s Howard Bryant about the week in sports.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Now it’s time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: And I put on my sports doofus voice to tell you the first round of March Madness is over for the men – almost for the women. Top seeds have made it through. Meanwhile, the real Mr. Baseball has retired as Major League season opens in Japan. But don’t worry, BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music, is still with us. Howard Bryant of ESPN and ESPN The Magazine joins us. Howard, thanks so much for being with us.
HOWARD BRYANT, BYLINE: Hey, Scott. How are you doing?
SIMON: Fine, thank you. NCAA biggest upset so far in the men’s tournament – No. 13 seed, UC Irvine, upended No. 4, Kansas State, 70-64. What have you seen in the first couple days (unintelligible)?
BRYANT: Well, I like that win by Irvine. It was their first-ever tournament win, so those are always fun. I think that when you get to the tournament now, you sort of recognize that because of the dilution in the game, because so many of the great players come in one and done, you’re not going to have those four-year champions anymore, those really good powerful three-year teams that – it really is an upset-driven tournament. Seven, tens are no longer – and those are toss-ups – eight, nines are toss-ups.
And now all of a sudden, when you start getting the four seeds losing, there aren’t that many teams that are safe in those first round matchups. And so the good news, obviously, if you’re – if you believe in your bracket – is that the one seeds all came through pretty well.
But as you start getting into the second round, there aren’t any real dominant teams outside of Duke. Duke is the best team when they have a full complement, when they’ve been healthy, when Zion Williamson has been there. Together, they’ve lost one game. They lost to Gonzaga. Other than that, they – they’re pretty dynamite. But…
SIMON: To forestall email, it’s Gonzaga.
BRYANT: Is it Gonzaga? Oh, the Zags. That’s (unintelligible).
SIMON: Gonzaga.
BRYANT: Oh, my goodness.
SIMON: We hear it all the time.
BRYANT: Do I have to say it like that, though?
SIMON: Well, you can just say Gonzaga.
BRYANT: Just Gonzaga.
SIMON: Yeah.
BRYANT: But not – I can’t do the Scott Simon voice. So – and North Carolina is a good team. Michigan is a good team. I kind of like Houston. I haven’t heard about them for a really long time. They’re three seed. So it’s going to be Duke for now. But, you know, once again, you get to the tournament, anything’s possible.
SIMON: Women’s tournament – UConn, Texas A&M, Louisville have all gone into the second round. What are you going to be watching?
BRYANT: I’m going to be watching Mississippi State. They’ve gone to the final the last two years. They’ve lost – once heartbreakingly last year to Notre Dame. They lost the year before, as well. I think that those – when you have those teams that are knocking on the door, you know, they won last night by I think 57 points. And so I’m watching them. Obviously, UConn being the great UConn – 11-time champion that they’ve been. And they’re a two seed. They…
SIMON: Yes.
BRYANT: …Get upended by…
SIMON: I’m not used to that.
BRYANT: No one’s used to that. It hasn’t happened since 2006. And at the end of the day, when they get to the final, they don’t lose. They’ve never lost when they’ve gotten to the championship game. But I like the fact that you’ve got four, five, six teams that are that are really good. People talk about college basketball – women’s college basketball – being all UConn all the time. But Mississippi State’s a great team. Notre Dame’s a defending champion. And, you know, Baylor is a great team. This is as good and as much parity as we’ve had in some time. It’s good stuff.
SIMON: Finally, Major League Baseball season opened over – under the Tokyo Dome. One of the great ballplayers of all times – 45 years old – retired.
BRYANT: Forty-five.
SIMON: And he’s one of the great ballplayers in both the United States and Japan.
BRYANT: Yeah. Ichiro Suzuki – and just Ichiro, that’s all we need to know him by…
SIMON: Yeah.
BRYANT: …He’s one of those one-namers (ph) – really phenomenal player and just a dynamic player. I remember Ichiro came in – when he came in with Seattle in 2001. I was covering the Oakland A’s. So we got to see Ichiro numerous times. And he won the MVP and the rookie of the year that year. And they won 116 games. And so it’s a really sort of interesting thing when you’re watching his style. We always talk about being kids and copying batting stances and everything else. He’s that dynamic a guy. People are…
SIMON: Yeah.
BRYANT: …Going to remember him for a long time – 3,000 hits, 4,300 hits across both countries. He’s as good as it gets – maybe the best hitter of all time.
SIMON: Yeah. I agree. And the real Mr. Baseball, a great spirit in the game. Howard Bryant of ESPN, thanks so much.
BRYANT: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOUBAB’S “BAMANA NIYA”)
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Contrast agent, a drug that enhances CT scans, is sometimes skipped because of concerns about side effects.
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One of the most widely used drugs in the world isn’t really a drug, at least not in the usual sense.
It’s more like a dye.
Physicians call this drug “contrast,” shorthand for contrast agent.
Contrast agents are chemical compounds that doctors use to improve the quality of an imaging test. In the emergency room, where I work, contrast is most commonly given intravenously during a CT scan.
About 80 million CT scans are performed annually in the U.S., and the majority are done with contrast.
Most contrast agents I use contain iodine, which can block X-rays. This effect causes parts of an image to light up, which significantly enhances doctors’ ability to detect things like tumors, certain kinds of infections and blood clots.
One thing about contrast agents that makes them different from typical drugs is that they have no direct therapeutic effect. They don’t make you feel better or treat what’s ailing you. But they might be crucial in helping your doctor make the right diagnosis.
Because these drugs are used in some people who might not turn out to have anything wrong with them, and in others who may be seriously ill, contrast agents need to be quite safe.
And by and large they are. Some patients may develop serious allergic reactions or cardiovascular complications, but these are rare. Others may experience nausea or headache.
But there is one widely feared adverse effect of contrast — kidney damage. As a result, contrast is often withheld from patients deemed by their doctors to be at risk for kidney problems. The downside is that these patients may not receive the diagnostic information that would be most useful for them.
In recent years, though, new research has led some physicians to question whether this effect has been overstated.
Is it time to rethink the risk?
The first report of kidney damage after intravenous contrast, which became known as contrast-induced nephropathy, or CIN, appeared in a Scandinavian medical journal in 1954. An early form of contrast had been given to a patient for a diagnostic test. The patient quickly developed renal failure and died. The authors proposed that the contrast may have been responsible, because they could find no other clear cause during an autopsy.
With other physicians now primed to the possibility, similar reports began appearing. By the 1970s, renal injury had become a “well-known complication” of contrast in patients with risk factors for kidney disease, like diabetes. By 1987, intravenous contrast was proclaimed to be the third-leading cause of hospital-acquired kidney failure.
The belief that contrast agents were risky had a significant effect on how often doctors used them. In a 1999 survey of European radiologists, 100 percent of respondents believed that CIN occurred in at least 10-20 percent of at-risk patients, and nearly 20 percent believed it occurred in over 30 percent of such patients. A 2006 survey found that 94 percent of radiologists considered contrast to be contraindicated beyond a certain threshold of renal function — a threshold that nearly 1 in 10 middle-aged American men could exceed.
But Dr. Jeffrey Newhouse, a professor of radiology at Columbia University, had a hunch that something wasn’t quite right with the conventional wisdom. He has administered contrast thousands of times, and rarely did it seem to him that contrast could be said to have been directly toxic. There were often far too many variables at play.
Newhouse decided to go back to the primary literature. In 2006, he and a colleague reviewed more than 3,000 studies on contrast-induced nephropathy and came to an astounding conclusion — only two had used control groups, and neither of those had found that contrast was dangerous.
“Everyone assumed that any kidney injury after contrast was a result of the contrast,” Newhouse said, “but these studies had no control groups!”
In other words, there was no group of patients who hadn’t received contrast to use for comparison.
Newhouse discovered that nearly every study supporting CIN had fallen prey to this shortcoming. The importance of controls in any experiment is elementary-level science; without them, you can’t say anything about causation.
What came next was brilliant. “Having criticized those that did the experiment without the control, we decided to do the control without the experiment,” Newhouse said. He reviewed 10 years of data from 32,000 hospitalized patients, none of whom received contrast. He found that more than half of the patients had fluctuations in their renal function that would have met criteria for CIN had they received contrast.
This raised the possibility that other causes of kidney injury — and not the contrast — could have explained the association found in earlier studies.
Other researchers stepped up after Newhouse published his findings in 2008. Physicians in Wisconsin conducted the first large study of CIN with a control group in 2009. In more than 11,500 patients, overall rates of kidney injury were similar between people who received contrast and those who hadn’t.
There was one major weakness with the study, though — it was retrospective, meaning it relied on medical records and previously collected data. When a study is performed this way, randomization to different treatments can’t be used to guard against biases that could distort results.
So, for instance, if the physicians treating patients in the Wisconsin study were worried about giving contrast to high-risk patients, they may have steered them into the group receiving CT scans without it. These sicker patients might have been more likely to have kidney injury from other causes, which could mask a true difference between the groups.
The next generation of retrospective studies tried to use a special statistical technique to control for these biases.
The first two appeared in 2013. Researchers in Michigan found that contrast was associated with kidney injury in only the highest-risk patients, while counterparts at the Mayo Clinic, using slightly more sophisticated methods, found no association between contrast and kidney injury.
A third study, from Johns Hopkins, appeared in 2017. It, too, found no relationship between contrast and kidney injury in nearly 18,000 patients. And in 2018, a meta-analysis of more than 100,000 patients also found no association.
What did Newhouse make of these results?
“Nearly harmless and totally harmless — we’re somewhere between those two,” he says. “But how much harm is done in withholding the stuff? We just don’t know.”
Still, Dr. Michael Rudnick, a kidney specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, isn’t so sure it’s time to clear contrast agents completely. He thinks there still could be some danger to the highest-risk patients, as the Michigan researchers found. And he pointed out that even sophisticated statistical analyses can’t control for all possible biases. Only a randomized trial can do that.
Here’s the rub, though. Rudnick says we’re unlikely to get a randomized, controlled trial because there’s still a possibility that contrast could be harmful, and ethics committees are unlikely to approve such a trial.
It’s a conundrum that existing belief about contrast agents could actually limit our ability to conduct the appropriate trials to investigate that belief.
Matthew Davenport, lead author of the 2013 Michigan study, and chair of the American College of Radiology’s Committee on Drugs and Contrast Media, says “the vast majority of things we used to think were CIN probably weren’t.”
But he does agree with Rudnick that there could still be real danger for the highest-risk patients. He echoed the current American College of Radiology recommendations that the decision to use contrast in patients with pre-existing renal disease should remain an individualized clinical decision.
For now, if you are in need of a scan that could require contrast, talk about the risks and benefits of the medicine for you and make the decision together with your doctor.
Clayton Dalton is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The Uzbek and Russian teams clash in the World Nomad Games as Uzbekistan tries to score in a game of kok-boru — a form of polo played with a headless goat carcass.
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Two bare-chested men on horseback wrestle. The goal is to pull your opponent off the horse so a part of his body touches the ground.
Three dogs chase a dummy clad in a fox or hare skin to see who’s fastest. Biting an opponent is grounds for disqualification.
Two competitors engage in er-enish — wrestling on horseback.
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Nicolas Tanner for NPR
And then there is this sport: “Each team seeks to throw as many goat carcasses as possible into the tai kazan (goal) of the opposing team.”
They’re definitely not Olympic sports but they are a part of another global competition: The World Nomad Games, held in Kyrgyzstan last September. That’s the landlocked central Asian nation of 6.2 million that, centuries ago, was a stop on the Silk Road traveled by traders from China to the Mediterranean. In modern times, it was part of the Soviet Union until it declared independence in 1991.
Police officers stand guard during preparations for the opening ceremonies of the third World Nomad Games in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan, held in September.
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This was the third iteration of the games, which were spearheaded by former Kyrgyzstani president Almazbek Atambayev and highlight both unusual regional sports as well as more traditional ones like archery. According to the local press, 2,000 athletes from 80 countries competed before an audience of 150,000, about a third of whom were foreign tourists. The overall cost was about $6.7 million, with $2.3 million covered by private sponsors and the rest picked up by the government.
A Turkish tightrope walker shows his skills at the games.
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The government involvement has prompted some local criticism, according to a New York Times report. “Keep in mind that Kyrgyzstan, compared to its neighbors, is a relatively open country with regard to freedom of speech. So people there tend to be more vocal in criticizing the actions of the government,” wrote Kanybek Nurtegin, a professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University who grew up in Kyrgyzstan. “While the country could indeed have used the funds on other pressing issues, I think the idea of bringing people together to enjoy peaceful events, reviving cultural traditions and hosting guests from dozen of countries is a great idea.”
In a country that’s not rich in natural resources, he adds, “tourism is a promising industry.”
Nurtegin thinks the games “have put Kyrgyzstan on the world map.”
A Kyrgyz woman from the southern part of the country (center) and other onlookers watch the Nomad Game events.
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Nicolas Tanner, a photojournalist and student at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine, chronicled the third World Nomad Games. “There were so many bloggers there,” Tanner says, “to do Instagram stories, showing this thing to the world.”
Tanner, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kyrgyz village of At-Bashy from 2008 to 2010, spoke with us about the Games.
Kyrgyz teenagers pose with hunting dogs and eagles that are part of the Nomad Games.
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How do the Kyrgyz maintain their ancient traditions in the face of modern influence?
By choosing to stay by super hardcore tradition – their sense of tradition is sacred to them. If you ask a Kyrgyz person who their father’s father’s father’s father’s father was, they can tell you. They can tell you who was in their family like seven generations back. That’s how you bring the past forward.
A Kyrgyz performer at the games poses with his daughter.
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Are there still nomads among the Kyrgyz people?
Kyrgyz are partially nomadic: In the winters [some of them] live in a house, then in the summers they’ll go out. Traditionally, they would just go out in what’s called the jailoo, which is a mountain pasture. Now they have these cellphones, and they can communicate back down to their families or with each other. So it makes their ease of movement actually easier or more efficient.
Cellphones in general are sort of a wild, little nomadic tool — it sort of makes all of us nomadic. We can now kind of be anywhere and still be communicating to anywhere else.
A member of the Mongolian horse wrestling team passes a flag to another member who is preparing for a victory lap around the stadium after a match victory.
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Since we’re Goats and Soda, I have to ask: what is headless goat polo like?
It’s called kok-boru [which means gray wolf, said to be the animal first used in this sport.]
They cut the hooves and the head off the goat. They’re basically [two teams of] men on horses trying to get the goat into the other team’s goal. It’s a physical game, guys get bloody and horses fall down.
This target was used during the horseback archery event.
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The next set of games, in 2020, will take place in Turkey – which is one of the sponsoring countries. How do the locals in Kyrgyzstan feel about that?
I did talk to some that said essentially, That’s fine, whatever. But these games are mostly Kyrgyz and we created the games, so why not keep it here? Well, because it’s worth money now, so Turkey wants in.
Freelance writer Joel Goldberg covers sports, science and culture and has contributed to NPR, National Geographic Magazine and On Tap Magazine.
