Sports Medicine Reprise

I shadowed a family sports medicine doctor several days ago. It was cool to see sports medicine from that perspective. He sees fewer "surgical" patients (more chronic low back pain, patello-femoral syndrome, etc.) but a big role is deciding whether a patient needs to be referred to an orthopedic surgeon. It's also interesting that he has a heavy family medicine approach. One woman came in with a knee complaint and after examining the knee, he commented on a mole that looked like a basal cell carcinoma. He told her that they should monitor that over time, something I would never have heard from an orthopedic surgeon. Also, about half of the patients at his office aren't there for musculoskeletal issues; they have regular family medicine complaints like soft tissue infections.

The final thing is that this was private practice and it's entirely different. He schedules his patients 30 minutes because that's what he wants. The office has its own X-ray machine, and one of the receptionists doubles as an X-ray tech. He even had to have a conference with some of his neighbors because a new tenant was coming into the complex and needed to zone the parking lot differently. That was a weird conference; they kept on talking about contingencies and the city council and property value. I was pretty surprised.