CLUB doctors and coaches should wrest the power away from sports scientists, according to former St Kilda club doctor Rohan White.
He said the drama at Essendon showed coaches should be all empowered and club doctors responsible for player health and welfare.
"The evolution of sports science within the AFL has been that the sports science individuals have worked independently of the doctor, often to the point where the club doctor is not aware of what the sport scientist is doing and where he is doing it," White said.
"The explosion of sports science is such that there are people coming in with some expertise and pushing the boundaries with this type of therapy."
White said sports scientists had introduced a more scientific approach to training mythologies, including beep tests. He said the hot/cold recovery method, now taken for granted, was also introduced by sports scientists.
"Their discipline is more now and it certainly now takes in much more, including dietary, behavioural, psychology and pharmacology," White said.
And White says high-protein supplements, popular in the mid-1990s, were replaced by a new wave of therapies that players and administrators had not kept up with and didn't understand their potency.
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"To go from protein powders to peptides and other agents was progression which sort of went unnoticed," he said.
"A lot of footballers would not know one end of a peptide. A few of them have potentially and unintentionally dabbled in this stuff without knowing what it was."
White said unfortunately for the players, ignorance was no excuse.
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