{"id":192399,"date":"2026-06-11T15:39:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=192399"},"modified":"2026-06-11T15:45:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:45:14","slug":"nyt-conor-mcgregors-comeback-a-tale-of-banned-drugs-and-a-famous-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=192399","title":{"rendered":"NYT: ‘Conor McGregor\u2019s Comeback: A Tale of Banned Drugs and a Famous Doctor’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael S. Schmidt writes for The New York Times<\/a>: <\/p>\n

McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship\u2019s main attraction, had the support of the prominent sports physician Neal ElAttrache when he decided to use performance-enhancing drugs.<\/p>\n

The doctor, Neal ElAttrache, oversaw the surgery to repair McGregor\u2019s leg. He is a widely celebrated figure and has treated a litany of Hollywood actors and baseball and football stars. He is also the head physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Rams.<\/p>\n

In response to questions from The Times, ElAttrache said by text that after he had repaired McGregor\u2019s broken leg he sent him to specialists in bone healing and \u201cexplained that I don\u2019t prescribe hormone or steroid treatment.\u201d He was referring to drugs banned by nearly all major sports because they help athletes build muscle far faster than the human body can by itself.<\/p>\n

ElAttrache said that after McGregor saw a specialist, he wrote a letter supporting McGregor\u2019s application for a special exemption that would have allowed him to use performance-enhancing drugs without facing a penalty.<\/p>\n

Officials overseeing the U.F.C.\u2019s drug testing program believed that in seeking the exemption, McGregor \u2014 with the imprimatur of ElAttrache \u2014 was trying to exploit a loophole to use banned drugs, the two people said. It was the beginning of a split between the U.F.C. and the United States Anti-Doping Agency, known as USADA, the entity that was overseeing the U.F.C.\u2019s drug testing program.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Across more than three decades of practice in Los Angeles, Neal Sami ElAttrache<\/a> (b. 1960) has occupied the point where elite athletics, surgical innovation, celebrity culture, and the commerce of professional sports converge. The teams that won championships, the athletes who signed record contracts, and the performers whose bodies constitute their livelihoods came to him when those bodies failed. His career tracks the transformation of sports medicine from a specialized branch of orthopedics into a central institution of professional sport, and his biography offers a study in how a medical tradition passes from founders to heirs.<\/p>\n

ElAttrache grew up in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, in a home where medicine and family life shared the same rooms. His father, Selim ElAttrache, a Syrian Druze immigrant, practiced orthopedic surgery and treated patients whether or not they could pay, at times accepting goods and services in place of money. His mother, Vera, worked as a nurse. Patients came through the family home, and the son absorbed early the personal character of the bond between physician and patient. He later described this as the foundation of his own practice: medicine rests on trust before it rests on technique.<\/p>\n

He attended the University of Notre Dame<\/a>, where he won the light-heavyweight boxing championship as a freshman. The victory revealed a competitive temperament and a physical confidence that later eased his rapport with professional athletes, men who size up everyone around them by how they carry themselves. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1981 and took his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine<\/a> in 1985. A general surgery internship and an orthopedic residency in Pittsburgh followed. Then came the move that defined his career. He went west for a sports medicine fellowship at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic<\/a> in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

The fellowship placed him under Robert Kerlan<\/a> (1922-1996) and Frank Jobe<\/a> (1925-2014), the two men who built modern sports medicine in America. Kerlan had pioneered the role of the team physician for professional franchises. Jobe had revolutionized the field in 1974 when he reconstructed the ulnar collateral ligament of pitcher Tommy John<\/a> (b. 1943), an operation that now carries the patient’s name and that rescued thousands of throwing careers. ElAttrache became more than a trainee under these men. He became the institutional heir to their tradition. From Jobe he inherited a conception of sports medicine as the restoration of elite human performance rather than mere orthopedic repair. The distinction shaped everything he did afterward. A surgeon who repairs a shoulder returns a man to daily life. A surgeon who restores performance returns a pitcher to a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball, and the second task demands a different relationship to anatomy, rehabilitation, and risk.<\/p>\n

ElAttrache joined Kerlan-Jobe upon completing his fellowship and rose alongside the commercialization of professional sports. He became head team physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> and the Los Angeles Rams<\/a> and served as orthopedic consultant to the Los Angeles Lakers<\/a>, the Los Angeles Kings<\/a>, and the Anaheim Ducks<\/a>. In 2008 he served as senior orthopedic surgeon for the United States Olympic team at the Beijing Games<\/a>. As franchises grew into billion-dollar enterprises and player contracts climbed into the hundreds of millions, the physician who determined when an athlete could return to competition acquired a new kind of authority. ElAttrache exercised that authority more often, and at higher stakes, than perhaps any surgeon of his generation.<\/p>\n

A succession of landmark cases marks his surgical career, each carrying consequences for entire organizations rather than single careers. In 2008 he reconstructed the anterior cruciate ligament of Tom Brady<\/a> (b. 1977) after an injury that threatened the New England Patriots dynasty. In 2013 he repaired the ruptured Achilles tendon of Kobe Bryant<\/a> (1978-2020), an injury that ranks among the most consequential in modern basketball. In 2023 he performed a modified elbow procedure on Shohei Ohtani<\/a> (b. 1994) as Ohtani prepared to sign the largest contract in the history of professional sports. He treated Aaron Rodgers<\/a> (b. 1983) after Rodgers ruptured his Achilles tendon, and the rehabilitation protocols developed for that recovery compressed timelines that the profession had long considered fixed. Each case tested the same question: how far can surgical technique and rehabilitation science push the boundary between injury and career resumption?<\/p>\n

ElAttrache matched his clinical work with invention. In 1999 he developed a socket-and-screw fixation system for attaching tendons and ligaments to bone. Licensed through Arthrex<\/a>, the device spread throughout orthopedic surgery and generated substantial royalties. He called it orthopedic duct tape, a joke that revealed his preference for practical answers to complex surgical problems. He refined the docking technique in Tommy John surgery<\/a>, reducing bone trauma and improving graft fixation. His contributions to rotator cuff repair, Achilles reconstruction, and rehabilitation protocol became standards across the specialty.<\/p>\n

His academic record gave the clinical reputation an institutional foundation. He authored roughly one hundred peer-reviewed articles, forty textbook chapters, and ten instructional videos, and he delivered more than three hundred lectures in the United States and abroad. His publications on shoulder surgery, elbow reconstruction, and knee ligament repair circulate widely in the field. Through this body of work he linked the laboratory, the operating room, and the training facility, three worlds that the founders of his specialty had first joined and that he kept joined.<\/p>\n

Leadership followed scholarship. He served as president of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine<\/a> from 2018 to 2019 and as president of the Herodicus Society from 2016 to 2017. He chaired the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Foundation, co-chaired medical affairs for the Kerlan-Jobe Institute, and sat on the clinic’s board. When Kerlan-Jobe partnered with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center<\/a> in 2014 to form the Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute, ElAttrache guided the transition. The merger expressed a broader pattern in American medicine, the absorption of physician-owned practices into large health systems, and it posed the question of whether a clinic built on the personal authority of founding surgeons might survive inside a corporate structure. Under ElAttrache’s stewardship, the institution kept its reputation for elite athletic care while gaining the resources of a major medical center.<\/p>\n

Recognition accumulated. Medical publications and surveys named him among Southern California’s top physicians year after year. Observers of Los Angeles sports counted him among the most powerful figures in that world, a striking judgment about a man who never owned a team, coached a game, or signed a player. His patient roster grew beyond athletics to include actors, musicians, and public figures, anyone whose livelihood depends on a body that performs. In Los Angeles, a city organized around performance, the surgeon who restores performance occupies a singular position.<\/p>\n

The personal dimension of his practice distinguishes him as much as the technical. He married Tricia Flavin, an operating room nurse he met during his early years at Kerlan-Jobe, and together they raised three daughters. Athletes who came to him as patients stayed as friends. They sought his counsel on matters far from surgery and remained in contact years into retirement. For ElAttrache, the physician-patient bond constitutes an enduring human connection built on loyalty and confidence rather than a professional transaction. The philosophy descends in a straight line from the house in Mount Pleasant where patients walked through the family door.<\/p>\n

That same philosophy drew him into controversy. After mixed martial artist Conor McGregor<\/a> (b. 1988) suffered a catastrophic leg fracture in a 2021 UFC bout, ElAttrache participated in the surgical repair and later supported McGregor’s application for a therapeutic use exemption that might have permitted substances prohibited under anti-doping rules during recovery. The exemption was denied. A 2026 investigation by The New York Times<\/a> reported that anti-doping officials viewed the request with skepticism and that experts could not recall a comparable exemption sought for treatment of a broken bone. ElAttrache defended the exemption process as a legitimate channel for medical care and argued that athletes should not lose access to appropriate treatment because a substance appears on a prohibited list. The episode exposed the unstable boundary between healing and enhancement, between athlete welfare and competitive fairness, a boundary that the physician devoted to his patient and the regulator devoted to the sport draw in different places. The same loyalty that made athletes trust him made regulators wary.<\/p>\n

By the mid-2020s, ElAttrache had become more than a surgeon. He was an inventor, a researcher, an institutional leader, a mentor to a generation of fellows, and the custodian of a tradition that runs back through Jobe and Kerlan to the founding of his specialty. His influence travels through the athletes he treated, the surgeons he trained, the techniques he devised, and the institutions he built and preserved. His career embodies the maturation of sports medicine from a niche discipline into a visible and consequential branch of modern medicine, and it raises the questions that attend any field where healing, money, fame, and competition meet. Few physicians have shaped the careers of elite performers to a comparable degree. Fewer still have defined a specialty while practicing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael S. Schmidt writes for The New York Times: McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship\u2019s main attraction, had the support of the prominent sports physician Neal ElAttrache when he decided to use performance-enhancing drugs. The doctor, Neal ElAttrache, oversaw the surgery … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29729],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medicine"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192399"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192404,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192399\/revisions\/192404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}