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Charles Barkley was an NBA All-Star who retired in 2000.

He was an incredible basketball player but also an incredibly outspoken and controversial figure. He once got into trouble for spitting on a little girl in the crowd when he tried to spit on a heckler during a game.

He was a member of the 1992 USA Dream Team which was the most successful basketball team in history, certainly in Olympic terms.

He was also devastatingly honest at times and when he was asked about his signature Nike shoes he said:

“These are my new shoes. They’re good shoes. They won’t make you rich like me, they won’t make you rebound like me. They definitely won’t make you handsome like me. They only make you have the shoes like me. That’s it”

It’s rare for someone to be as honest as that about something like that and I’m sure his sponsors didn’t like it.

It raises a question though…

Just because you use what I use or do what I do doesn’t mean you can be what I am.

For years now in teaching I have shown a picture of Lance Armstrong in the Prologue Time Trial in Monaco in the Tour de France years ago in all his Trek, Nike and Giro kit.

The rules are and were that that kit had to be available commercially to any individual for the riders to be able to wear it. The rationale behind that is that if I see Lance winning the time trial I’m going to buy his kit because I want to be like Lance. I want the kit to make me feel like him. I want to believe that I can do what he can do.

This is all well and good with amateur athletics but not quite so good with healthcare.

Just because I stand up at an International conference and show you a technique doesn’t mean that it works and it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re able to make it work.

It’s time that we moved on from showboating sales in healthcare, where we got to as far as dentistry was concerned in the early 2000s and have seemed not to be able to get away from since.

We need proven things that work in the hands of normal individuals. That’s the big news and that should be the devastating headlines.

I understand that it makes you feel nice when you wear a pair of Nike Air Jordans but that’s a different thing from experimenting on a patient in your surgery because you saw something on Saturday on a course.

 Blog Post Number: 1864