Nadal on crutches, Wimbledon in doubt

Two days after celebrating his 14th career triumph at Roland Garros, Rafa Nadal returned to Mallorca. The Spaniard got out of the airport car on crutches and stopped to sign autographs anyway. Before returning, he underwent the first pulsed radiofrequency treatment that he decided to resort to to relieve the pain that comes from Muller-Weiss syndrome in his left foot. Nadal, who was not unbalanced after the first session on the effectiveness of the treatment, has not yet resolved his doubts about his presence at Wimbledon, a tournament he last won in 2010. The chronic problem Nadal suffers from is a scaphoid malformation of the left foot. It is a degenerative condition that afflicts one of the small bones in the central part of the foot, but they are crucial for mobility. The Majorcan contains it with specially made shoes and insoles that alter the foothold. But the scaphoid, the last bone that calcifies in the human skeleton, remains extremely vulnerable. At Roland Garros Nadal played thanks to anesthetizing injections on two nerves that completely numbed the foot, leaving it without any sensation. The new treatment based on the minimally invasive technology of pulsed radiofrequency, increasingly used in the treatment of even chronic pain, aims to disinhibit the nerve, and therefore reduce the sensation of pain, but does not completely remove the sensitivity of the foot. This particular treatment, which has been used since 1996, involves the insertion towards the nerve, under local anesthesia, of a cannula inside which a metal wire is inserted. This wire is connected to a radiofrequency generator that allows a current to flow with the same frequency as the radio waves. Those who undergo the treatment do not feel the passage of this current, but at the end of the session the electric field generated leads to a substantial decrease or disappearance of pain.