ESPN has an excellent article about the conflict of interest that team doctors in the National Football League face as well as the surprisingly low level of care that athletes making hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year receive.
The things that Jeff Novak faced from the Jacksonville Jaguars team doctor is just obscene, but unique only because Novak’s leg wound is just so visibly disgusting — that and the idiocy of the team doctor maintaining it was appropriate to do surgery on Novak’s leg at a stadium in non-sterile conditions.
One of the worst incidents I remember (though the player and team escape me) was a team doctor who was giving a player a pain killing shot and ended up puncturing his lung.
A major part of the problem is that the team doctor’s rely on their connections with the team to build their practices. As such, it is in their interest to put the coaches and owners demands above the medical needs of players.
Source:
At what price a player’s pain? Tom Farrey, ESPN.Com, Sept. 12, 2002.