UVA team physicians work with elite to recreational athletes to provide treatment and training to help with performance, injuries and recovery. These orthopedic specialists, including Dr. Werner, can help athletes with tears, tendonitis, dislocations and other sports-related injuries. The road to recovery includes rehabilitation services. Rehab is also available to prevent injuries.
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I’m the head orthopedic team physician for James Madison University. So, we have many high-level collegiate athletes in several different sports. It’s a different environment than taking care of patients in an office. So, you’re often on the sidelines of the events, watching the patients as they get injured. There’s also a lot of different people that you interact with.
So, there are primary team physicians, primary care team physicians as well, and then each sport has their own athletic trainer, and some of the sports have multiple athletic trainers. So, you’re interacting with all these, in addition to the athletes, when you’re taking care of them. When working with high-level collegiate athletes, there’s definitely a number of interactions between myself as the team physician, the athletic trainers for the player themselves, the player’s parents, as well as their coaching staff. They are all trying to help each of these people who have different educational backgrounds and different understanding of the injuries, learn what the injury is, learn what the treatment is, and then learn what the expected recovery is. So, everyone has different expectations for when that athlete is going to be back, and how that athlete is going to be managed.
So, it’s actually a very challenging thing to do to get these athletes back to play and help all of their different people that are involved in their life understand the injury, and know why it’s taking longer for them to get back, or why it requires surgery or doesn’t. Athletes are a very unique population to take care of. They’re very demanding. So, if we need to do surgery for them, they’re very demanding. They’re trying to get back to a very high level of sports. So, they challenge us, but they are also very good rehab candidates. They work really hard with their rehab. However, they also really have unique injuries that are very difficult to manage sometimes. So, it’s a very interesting field. They’re enjoyable to work with, and you get to see them recover throughout their entire college careers.
