Our Practice

This office is a venue to provide the highest quality of orthopaedic care. Recognizing that each individual is unique, our approach strives to meet your needs, by focusing on reducing pain and suffering, leading to increased activity and an improved quality of life.

My particular interest and expertise is chronic knee pain.  I am an experienced orthopaedic surgeon who trained in Canada and, over an extensive career (see Career Synopsis) both above and below the border, have developed particular competence in trauma, sports medicine, and limb reconstruction. My commitment is to demonstrate excellence in patient care and services, research, and education. I have attempted to achieve these objectives through empathy, compassion, and respect.

Care is provided in the following primary areas:

• Chronic knee pain
• Adolescent anterior knee pain
• Sports medicine
• Limb reconstruction
• Previously treated patients

Why the interest in Chronic Knee Pain?  

When I started my career in the Canadian Military, I saw many soldiers with Anterior Knee Pain (AKP), an enigmatic problem in which the pain can persist despite the best of non-operative care.  It pervasively dominates the daily life of the sufferer and has been called “ The Black Cloud of Orthpaedics”. Caring for such patients had been difficult.  An editorial in the journal “The Knee” in 2009 which gives a concise summary of the problem: “The patellofemoral syndrome; the same problem as the Loch Ness Monster?”. Questions arose from serendipitous and unexpected observations made during an arthroscopy early in my career. I sought answers to these fundamental questions that, which are linked to the physiology of the knee, and to how we perceive knee pain. The research that followed shed light on new knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the knee, and led to the development of an alternative clinical approach to AKP that features arthroscopic surgery that is safe, simple, and effective in most. It is particularly successful in children who often develop AKP in association with the growth spurt. The onset can be a simple injury, the overuse of excessive athletic activity, or even without any inciting incident. Within months the pain can take over the child’s life. Given this reality, my recommendation for adolescent AKP that persists despite the best of conservative care, is investigation, including an MRI, and early arthroscopic treatment.

The associated basic science concepts arising from this research have changed my understanding of how pain is perceived in the knee, are applicable to the entire range of knee disorders. 

The website, AnteriorKneePain.com, in the process of being updated, will review all aspects of this research.  For the moment, it directs you to the peer-reviewed article that outlines this clinical approach.

Another career-long interest has been in the orthopaedic basic sciences, this arising because I was influenced while a resident by Dr. Lent Johnson, and Donald Sweet, Pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, at that time a respected world-wide referral center. They shared principles of an educational approach fostering understanding of disorders of the musculoskeletal system.  As a result of this collaboration, and in association with many others, I have been associated since 1987 with the Canadian Orthopaedic Association Basic Science Course, available to orthopaedic doctors in training, providing an overview of the core scientific principles that underly our profession (http://www.orthobasicscienceacademy.org).

The various presentations and publications related to this research and to the basic science approach to some disorders are listed under Contributions page.