John Elway - Dupuytren's Contracture

Superstar quaterback John Elway recently shared his experiences with Dupuytren's Contracture which afflicts the hands. As one who built his career using his hands, this was an especially confounding and cruel illness by the way it froze his fingers in a bent position. He said on the NBC "Today" Show that "For me not to be able to pick up a football, that was an emergency."

This illness doesn't strike suddenly. It's a progressive problem, one that the late US President Ronald Reagan also suffered.

DR. PHILIP BLAZAR is a hand and upper extremity expert who sheds tremendous light on Dupuytren's contracture in this conversation. He practices at the top-rated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He's also an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, and he's the director for the Harvard Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery Fellowship. In 2019, he was named a top doctor by Boston Magazine and by Castle Connolly which offers rankings on doctors nationwide.