Omaha Nighthawks' Orthopaedic Surgeon, Dr. Charles Burt on Sports Medicine

Nebraska Orthopaedic Hospital Surgeon and Head of Sports Medicine for the Omaha Nighthawks, Dr. Charles Burt, discusses the ins and outs of Sports Medicine, including the makeup of the Omaha Nighthawks Sports Medicine team, why he does it and how it's relevant to everyone, not just professional athletes.

Transcript:
For me it was just, I was an athlete, and like about two thirds of these guys who do what I do, we're just a bunch of ex-athletes who hurt ourselves and thought it was cool to figure out how to fix people. The role of the team physician for the Omaha Nighthawks is basically to coordinate the care for all the Nighthawk players. One of the most important things we do with the pre-participation physicals is make sure from an orthopaedic stand point is to make sure all these players have healthy bones and joints. Many of these people have had significant injuries in the past. They've played a very high level of football and our job is to make sure that they are truly ready to go out and compete and then along with that we do a lot of internal medicine, family physicians, who make sure from an overall medical standpoint make sure that they don't have any other medical problems that would limit their ability to compete at the highest level. I spend time every week in the training room. I evaluate all the players that have been injured after the training staff have done an initial evaluation. Some of those players require more urgent care. They require x-rays, MRIs, and such as that. We do see significant injuries, sometimes season ending injuries, fortunately most injuries can be cared for by examination in the training room, care and rehabilitation by the training staff, and then we can get the players back out on the field. The Omaha Nighthawks actually have a very extensive medical team that can take care of them. It includes myself, an orthopaedic surgeon specially trained in sports medicine. One of my partners, Dr. Scott Reynolds, who's also specially trained in sports medicine, assists me. We have a head internal medicine team physician, Dr. Monny Matthews, who's very experienced and has cared for some of the local colleges and has the most experience really of anyone in the region. Then the person in the trenches with the nighthawks every day is John Burrell, our head athletic trainer and he has two assistant athletic trainers who're very much involved in the day to day care of the athletes. The Omaha Nighthawks are very fortunate to have a trainer with the experience of John Burrell. Myself, and my partners who help take care of the Omaha Nighthawks, are all orthopaedic surgeons but also are specially trained in sports medicine which means we did additional training specific to sports injuries, surgical and non-surgical care of sports injuries. And then we're also specialty board certified in sports medicine which means after all that training we've proven that we've continued to take care of athletes and we've stayed up with the latest treatments and are actively involved in the care athletes from a professional level all the way down to recreational athletes. There's no question that Sports Medicine isn't just for the Professional athlete. Life really is a sport. The vast majority of people that we take care of are people living their lives. Whether you're a recreational athlete, a varsity high school athlete, a college athlete or a professional athlete I think it's very important that if you sustain some sort of injury, that you seek care from a qualified sports medicine, specially trained orthopaedic surgeon.

Omaha Nighthawks Team Surgeon Dr. Charles Burt on Torn ACLs

Nebraska Orthopaedic Hospital Surgeon and Head of Sports Medicine for the Omaha Nighthawks, Dr. Charles Burt, talks about ACL injuries, how they happen, how to avoid them and what can be done to treat them.

Transcript:
Typically the way you injure your ACL is by turning or cutting off a fixed foot on the ground. You go to cut turn jump, land and they feel a sense of their knee buckling or other times they feel something popped in their knee. Typically what happens after that is they end up with a very swollen knee, difficulty walking on it and at that point they seek medical attention. Most people these days, if they injure their ACL, especially if they do in some sort of higher level activity, they chose to have their ACL reconstructed. You can't really repair an ACL. People talk about repair. We don't actually sow it back together. Once the ACL is torn, unfortunately it doesn't have the ability to heal itself. And so what we have to do is we have to reconstruct it which involves taking tissure from somewhere else in your body or donor tissue and creating a new ACL. For recreational athletes, the vast majority of people will have a hamstring-tendon and ACL reconstruction. A lot of the professional level athletes will still choose to have teller-tendon reconstruction. Both are very good, both are very stable, the teller-tendon construction has a higher level of conditional stability which will allow the professional athlete to really push it hard to get better more quickly. For the vast majority of even high school and college athletes, the hamstring reconstruction or the quadriceps reconstruction is less painful, more cosmetically appealing and has some other long-term benefits. Anterior-Cruciate-Ligament Injuries are unfortunately very common injury becoming more and more common as the level of sports intensity rises, especially in the younger population. If you truly are going to compete in sports or even if you just have a regular job, you're 50 years old and you have a manual labor job, it's very important, because you work very hard and you're taxing you're body, it's very important to take care of it. Many people come into my office after they've sustained an ACL injury, and they ask how long is it going to take to get back to sports? In their mind they think about the professional athletes they've heard about returning after anywhere from 4-6 months. Oftentimes it's much longer time to recover, typically along the lines of more like 7-12 months before they're back. Part of the reason that professional athletes are able to return so quickly is the same reason that they're professional athletes. There is something about them that is different from the rest of us, and so they have abilities that we don't have, plus they have the time and the work-ethic to put into it.