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Traci Byrd, a trainer with OrthoArkansas, works with a high school football on the sidelines during a football game. Doctors and trainers are becoming more common at the high school level.

With football season in full swing, physicians on the sidelines are nearly as common as coaches and ball boys.

On the college level, the number of physicians at a game between two teams can be in the double digits.

The University of Arkansas recently added a physician assistant to remain in the stadium, not just for the games, but also during the week and to take care of the minor injuries incurred during practice.

The special treatment doesn't extend to just the school year, either.

When Arkansas All-American running back Darren McFadden injured his big toe in an early-morning brouhaha in Little Rock, it was Dr. Jack VanderSchilden who was roused at four o'clock in the morning to insert a metal pin in McFadden's toe.

And VanderSchilden is not just any orthopedic surgeon — he holds the Jackson T. Stephens Distinguished Chair in Orthopaedic Sports Medicine at UAMS.

Whatever VanderSchilden did to McFadden, it was successful. McFadden, who was expected to miss much of the year, started in the season opener, a 50-14 loss to Southern Cal at Fayetteville.

A growing number of high schools in Arkansas have at least one physician on the sideline.

One such doctor making football rounds is Dr. Tad Pruitt, an orthopedic surgeon with OrthoArkansas.

"We take a number of high schools around central Arkansas," Pruitt said. "It kind of varies from Friday to Friday, but all of us here cover certain schools, and sometimes it's the schools that our kids go to and sometimes not. We go back and forth. Our practice covers 10 or 12 schools."

Pruitt's son plays football at Pulaski Academy, but he usually covers Arkansas Baptist.

How so?

"I'm just waiting my turn," he explained. "They have another orthopedic surgeon whose son plays."

Pulaski Academy is especially blessed with "lots of doctors running around out there," Pruitt commented.

Pulaski Academy athletics director Jerry Welch agrees.

"We usually have them coming over the rails when someone gets hurt," Welch said. "But they understand, if something is outside their specialty, they'll wait until someone else gets down there."

Welch, who has been at the school for two years, already has stories — really good stories — of plastic surgeons stitching up players at half-time and players being treated by a team of physicians in the parking lot after a game.

"We're very fortunate out here," Welch said. "I was in the public schools for 40 years and some of those … really struggle to get people out. That isn't so much true for the one-school communities, where the sports teams really define the town, and that isn't the case here, either. We're very blessed."

Such is the case with orthopedics, as a line has formed at Pulaski Academy and Welch added that is why Pruitt has to wait.

But Pruitt didn't get into orthopedic surgery to watch his son play football.

"My father-in-law is an orthopedic surgeon," Pruitt explained. "And he would let me help out, and you sort of quickly figure out if you want a surgical or procedural-based practice or a purely cognitive practice, and I knew I wanted to do a procedural practice."

That helped, and "with orthopedics, you have a pretty well-defined problem with a pretty well-defined solution, at least in most cases."

Orthopedics is a practice that runs the gamut; sports medicine is an important part of an orthopedics practice, added Pruitt.

The other fixture of sports medicine is the Saturday morning injury clinic.

"We have a clinic every Saturday during football," said Dr. Ethan Schock, an orthopedic surgeon with Arkansas Specialty Orthopaedics in Little Rock. "We'll have surgeons, trainers, physical therapists all out to evaluate injuries. The coaches or parents will bring them in and we'll check them out."

ie.
October 2006

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