His head isn't clear, his grip on reality is.

Eric Lindros isn't coloring his latest health setback with the usual happy-faced put-on. His season has been shattered by the diagnosis Wednesday of a Grade II concussion, much more severe than what Lindros' doctors in Philadelphia had previously diagnosed.

	Eric Lindros is a star, but his trade value might be lowered by his medical history.

His career, while not over, is certainly in a holding pattern. His status in Philadelphia, though still on a lofty plateau with fans, is on shaky ground with everybody else.

Off the record, of course.

"We'll still make him a qualifying offer after the season," Flyers president and general manager Bob Clarke said Thursday. "We're actually encouraged, because this doctor, who's supposedly an expert, says he'll be fine."

The doctor in question is James Kelly, one of the nation's foremost experts on brain injuries. He has worked directly with renowned concussion victims like Steve Young, Pat LaFontaine and Paul Kariya. He was called into this case upon the agreement of father-agent Carl Lindros, who agreed with his oldest son that the doctors who had been treating him in the past week didn't seem completely sure what they were talking about.

"I can't talk for them," Eric Lindros said Thursday, "but it is confusing sometimes."

Now, his brain bruised and spirit crushed, Lindros has come home with Kelly's order of staying off his skates for at least four weeks running around his aching head.

While his teammates are in the first round of the playoffs, Lindros will be allowed to only ride a bike, then fly back to Chicago in mid-April for another meeting with Kelly. If all goes as well as can possibly be expected, Lindros will then get the clearance for conditioning work.

According to his doctors, the earliest he could return to the ice is six weeks from now. According to what sources around the team think, it's quite possible Lindros will never play for the Flyers again.

Maybe that's why Lindros, a superstar with a history of keeping silent on his troubles with management and always painting his many injuries with as many positively white lies as he could create, suddenly took on a more sober perspective.

You say Eric Lindros won't play again this season? He doesn't seem sure.

"Do I plan on trying? I don't know," said Lindros. "There's been a lot that's gone on here. We'll see what happens."

You say Eric Lindros not only will miss the remainder of the season, but probably won't ever play again for the Flyers? He won't disagree.

"I've said it before and I'll say it again, I do enjoy playing here," Lindros said. "My teammates are great. The fans of this city are very passionate, very knowledgeable. It's a great city to play in. But as far as that (his future) is concerned, I'll just say the cards are not in my hand. I'm going to focus on getting better before I deal with that other issue."

The other issue seems more about how Lindros will become an ex-Flyer this summer rather than whether he will be an ex-Flyer. Ask him privately, and he'll be the first to admit he's the Flyer most likely to be traded this summer.

Of course, it won't be easy getting any semblance of fair value for a guy who made $8.5 million this season and has an increasingly alarming medical history.

Publicly, Lindros responded: "I can't get into that. You're opening up a whole can of worms with that question."

And perhaps that's appropriate, since most of Lindros' eight years in Philadelphia could be encapsulated in a Pandora's box.

Knee injuries. Back woes. A strange collapsed lung which almost killed him. And four concussions. Almost every time, there's been some form of controversy aggravating the injuries.

This time, an injury which will likely wipe him from the playoffs for a second straight year was accompanied by more shrouded debate than ever before. It all began with a forearm to the jaw dished out by Boston's Hal Gill on March 4 which left him sickened between periods at the FleetCenter.

It was Lindros' first game back since missing five with back spasms -- although that problem was more severe than Lindros and the medical staff were letting on. The spasms were related to the sacroiliac joint problem which wiped out Lindros' exhibition season -- a problem caused by his overcompensating for a weakness from the collapsed lung during his own strenuous workouts in the offseason.

This recent history of injuries was one reason why Lindros wasn't going come out of the game.

"The mentality of a hockey player is that you just want things to go away," said Lindros. "I must admit I wasn't clear with the doctor in Boston that I saw for 30 seconds on what was going on. But looking back -- hindsight being 20-20 -- I'm disappointed in the situation we're in now. Dr. Kelly didn't say we worsened it (by playing through symptoms), but he did say it didn't help."

Of course, there were other symptoms during that intermission in Boston that he tried to ignore when a Bruins team physician came in to look at him.

"This was a Grade II (concussion), and that is under the strict definition of the American Academy of Neurology," Kelly said. "He had a graying and yellowing of his vision. He was vomiting. He told them about this and it was pretty clear people knew he was experiencing a concussion. He tried to minimize it by playing. From what I understand, he reported his symptoms to everybody.

"My concern here is that Eric fought his way through this because he had just come off the injury list (with his back) and things only got worse."

Not only did the doctor in Boston give him a quick OK to get back in, Flyers athletic therapist John Worley didn't intervene. Even when Lindros' headaches and occasional vomiting continued in subsequent days as he played in three more games, he was treated only with analgesics and massages.

Although he didn't open his mouth, Lindros now says, "John Worley knew everything went to a yellow tinge. I came in after the period and vomited. I had heat packs on my head and a number of different things. I had a headache ... But I have to admit I wasn't too assertive."

But, hindsight being 20-20, Lindros saw fit Thursday to be assertive enough to take a share of the blame he's putting on Worley and share it with Bob Clarke, too.

"As the week went on, I was hoping the team would take me out, them knowing what went on (in Boston) and my expressing to them for days about my headaches," said Lindros. "But another reason I kept playing is this environment here is, well, interesting. The last time I had a concussion I didn't talk to Clarke for three weeks. And what he would say off the record was that my agent was a fool and disruptive for insisting for the team to follow the return-to-play guidelines."

So Worley is now being pointed at for his failure to push Lindros to be checked out for a concussion. Of course, when he doesn't want to be, Lindros is a personality that's hard to push.

In the wake of that Boston game, Lindros played the next night against the Islanders, and also the next three games against Tampa, Washington and Colorado -- one of the worst performances of his career -- on March 12. The next day, the Flyers were in Phoenix, and Lindros finally told Worley he was having symptoms and he removed himself from the lineup.

That was when teammate Keith Primeau said, "He's been having headaches all week," and Keith Jones said Lindros had told teammates he'd been forgetting shifts. So when the team returned home, Lindros underwent testing while team physician Jeff Hartzell said he didn't believe Lindros was suffering from a concussion, but rather from migraines.

The very next day, Hartzell said the tests revealed Lindros had suffered his fourth concussion in two years and second in two months, though the expert the Flyers called in, "headache specialist" Stephen Silberstein, said it was a Grade I, or mild concussion. Luckily, Silberstein also said his diagnosis would be re-checked by Kelly in Chicago. Unfortunately, Silberstein also informed the press that Lindros had taken "between 16-18 Advils a day," which spurred a series of stories that Eric was an analgesic junkie.

Lindros promptly went nuts, and Silberstein -- confused because he meant 1,600-1,800 milligrams of Advil (eight or nine tablets, not eighteen) -- quickly issued a statement saying he'd "misspoken."

Oops.

All along, Worley declined comment. But as Lindros prepared to go to Chicago, a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday, quoting an unidentified source, said Silberstein's diagnosis of a Grade I concussion on Lindros fell far short of what his symptoms should have been telling them.

The source reported of the headaches and vomiting between periods in Boston, which Clarke explained away by saying Lindros is one of several players he knows who gets so jacked up before games, "that he vomits all the time."

Then Clarke went on live television before that night's game against Montreal at First Union Center, using an impromptu press conference he called just to dress down the reporter who wrote the story. Calling the source's information "all a bunch of lies," Clarke also took the time to call the reporter "a jerk" and "an asshole."

He did this live and in living color, on the same cable network that's owned by the same company which owns Clarke's hockey team.

Only in Philadelphia, America!

Even as an admittedly depressed Lindros threw some blame toward team officials for the first time Thursday, Clarke was defiant in his defense.

"Our medical staff is great," said Clarke. "I have no concerns with it. I've heard none from anybody else. If it's his opinion then he can blame who he wants to blame. I've been in the NHL for 30 years and I've never seen a team let a player play that they know is injured. Some players do that, but the responsibility is their own. You can't play if you can't play and if the doctor says you can't play then you can't play. But lots of players have played against a doctor's wishes. But nobody here ever told him he had to play.

"We've got the best medical and training staff going. I've never seen a problem."

Perhaps he's not looking closely enough. Even as Lindros played while concussed, he was apparently putting himself at risk. A source close to Lindros said that, "by him playing, he really had put himself in danger. If he had taken a blow of similar proportions to the one he took in Boston, his (concussion) symptoms then would have been huge."

The way he played in Denver, it looked like he already had worsened the damage.

"John Worley knew what I had," said Lindros. "I was clear what I told him.

"I was not concealing it. I might not have been up-front with the doctor in Boston, but he knew."

Even those close to him don't deny Lindros should have thought better of playing while enduring the symptoms. He has seen his younger brother prematurely retire because he played games while still under the effects of a concussion. Big Brother Eric should have known better.

Of course, with Eric Lindros and the Flyers, circumstances are rarely logical ones.

"I just felt like I could keep on going, and take Advils to try to get rid of the headaches," said Lindros. "As the week went on, things got worse. In Colorado, I couldn't remember shifts. I knew things weren't real good, but I wasn't going to pull myself out of games, because I knew if I told my father -- well, my agent -- what was going on, I wouldn't be playing, and I didn't want that to happen. Because you know what goes on around here when my dad gets involved. It's a headache. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it stands around here."

That is, indeed, the way things are, the way things have been, the way things apparently always will be between Eric Lindros and Bob Clarke. A headache to be sure, but more than that.

It's an unhealthy relationship that has to end. The concussions will simply act as a convenient excuse.

Rob Parent covers the NHL for the Delaware County (Pa.) Times. His NHL East column appears every week on ESPN.com.