NFL’s chief medical officer ‘not familiar with anything’ that supports debunked substation conspiracy theory about 49ers’ injuries

The San Francisco 49ers were bit by the injury bug again this season, and badly too. Among others, they lost quarterback Brock Purdy, wide receiver Ricky Pearsall, tight end George Kittle, defensive end Nick Bosa and linebacker Fred Warner for significant time.

But the notion that the 49ers have led the NFL in non-direct contact and lower-extremity injuries is “simply not true,” according to the league’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills.

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“That’s false,” Sills said Friday during the league’s health and safety call, per NBC Sports Bay Area’s Matt Maiocco.

Additionally, Sills commented on the debunked conspiracy theory that links the 49ers’ unfortunate injury history to the proximity of the Silicon Valley Power Mission Substation, which is located next to Levi’s Stadium — also the site of this year’s Super Bowl and six World Cup matches this summer — and adjacent to the team’s practice facility.

“I would tell you that I’m not familiar with anything in the sports medicine literature that supports those associations, but I would also tell you that injury causation is really complex,” Sills said, per The Athletic.

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Sills added:

“If you think about biology and medicine, you don’t have usually one single factor that drives biological systems. And so when we think about injury causation, whether it’s lower-extremity strains or ACL or concussion … it’s equipment, it’s training, it’s prior injury history, it’s exposure, it’s play type. There’s so many things that go into that. And, so, I think it’s very rare in a biological system that you’ll see one factor that really drives an injury risk,” Dr. Sills said.

“So with that being said, we look at all factors. We look at it very comprehensively. I think it’s also important … to say that we have seen significant erroneous conclusions drawn from people using publicly available data sources. And what I mean by that is there’s research that often gets published where people take injury reports that are distributed media and use that to try to assess an injury burden. And those are almost universally wrong because they’re just not complete, and they’re not complete because they don’t have all the data because not everything gets put into those disclosure systems.”

The theory that the 49ers’ high volume of injuries is influenced by exposure to electromotive force, or EMF, which is characterized as the invisible electricity from electrical equipment like power lines, gained steam online after it was perpetuated by a person who describes himself on social media as a “board-certified quantum biology practitioner,” as reported by The Washington Post.

His post has gained more than 22 million views, and the theory has been discussed among NFL players. That theory, however, has had rejected by medical experts in the weeks leading up to Sills’ Friday remarks.

It’s also important to note that the 49ers have practiced next to the substation since 1988 and won three Super Bowls in that span.

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Frank de Vocht, a professor of epidemiology and public health at Bristol Medical School in England, said the theory is “nonsense,” per the Post, which described him as a leading expert on how electromagnetic fields affects humans.

Similarly, Jerrold Bushberg, a radiology professor at UC Davis, told Front Office Sports that “there is no firmly established evidence” that backs up the theory.

49ers general manager John Lynch was about the substation theory at his end-of-season news conference on Jan. 21.

“Because it deals with, allegedly, the health and safety of our players, I think you have to look into everything,” Lynch said.