The Official Chelsea Website's regular feature on terminology in football turns to the medical dictionary this week, and a hernia-related operation recently experienced by several of our players...

Honest answers now please. How many on first reading or hearing that Didier Drogba had undergone surgery on his groin problem on 23 July, were totally confident of seeing him start the first league game on 14 August, and in the right condition to smash in a hat-trick?

The striker in fact returned to playing as a substitute in Hamburg 10 days earlier and was also used as a sub in the Community Shield. It was stated in the news of the operation that his return to full training would be measured in weeks rather than months.

The word surgery is the one that automatically triggers thoughts of prolonged time out of the game, but that isn't the case for the procedure chosen by the Chelsea medical department for the injury Drogba had. It is the same operation that Alex underwent last summer and the one from which Frank Lampard and Jeffrey Bruma are currently undergoing rehabilitation.

Before explaining the surgery further, it is important to make clear that those players were not suffering from the everyday idea of a hernia. The condition hadn't progressed that far.

There is a weakness, in males especially, in the abdominal wall which sits below the skin and a layer of muscle. The area of weakness is in the groin where a small hole is necessary for the spermatic cord to pass through.

The weakness can lead to a bulge of abdominal contents, typically the bowel, coming through the wall that normally holds it back. This is a classic hernia. You can see it and you can feel it.

Our players were treated for a precursor to a hernia where the bowel is pressing on the weak area but not bulging through it. It still causes some pain and inhibition. The player may report an inability to accelerate as rapidly or jump as high as previously. The body is sensing that something is not quite right in the area.

To give it the formal medical term, the player is suffering from a posterior abdominal wall insufficiency and high-level sports with plenty of twisting and turning make an athlete susceptible to it.

Should the condition be diagnosed by Chelsea's medical director, Dr Bryan English, and his team then they can make a decision to rehabilitate the player with time off from activities that will aggravate the problem. Work to strengthen muscles in the area can reduce the load on the problem but there is more than a 50 per cent chance that surgery will be needed, even though the player can continue playing, albeit inhibited in movement. There is no danger of anything ripping or rupturing.

A common way of correcting the problem is for a surgeon to cut down to the muscle layer above the weakened wall and then gather some of the muscle together with a stitch to cover the hole or deficit. Sometimes a plastic mesh is put over the hole. Minimum rehabilitation time after this is six weeks and some players still feel tightness afterwards.

Dr English doesn't send our players down that route.

'We use Dr Ulrike Muschaweck in Germany who invented a minimal repair procedure that tightens up the posterior abdominal wall area that is insufficient,' he reports.

'It doesn't involve cutting any muscle which is why the recovery for sports people is so much quicker and so much better. When I first saw her lecture, what she was saying just made common sense to me.'

As can be seen in the diagrams below, the muscle is parted, a cut is made in the wall, the layers are pulled together and then sown.

'The Muschaweck Repair is getting to the primary cause of the problem,' English says. 'If you can go for a surgical technique that can get players back in two weeks compared to six then that is a lot of time and a lot of money saved.'

Following brief rest to overcome the anaesthetic and bleeding, the player should be running by day two after surgery. Otherwise some of the layers involved can stick down.

If, as in the case of Bruma, both sides of the groin undergo surgery (this is not done at the same time to help the body compensate), then rehabilitation time is doubled or tripled.

The return of Drogba, who underwent one operation, was not unusually fast.