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Excerpt
During residency, however, I was fortunate to work with primary care sports medicine-trained physicians. I enthusiastically joined them in their coverage of high school football games and worked with the athletic trainers at the local junior college, getting as much sports medicine experience as I could. These experiences solidified my decision to apply for a primary care sports medicine fellowship. One of the faculty completed a fellowship in Seattle and advised me to join the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). “It will make such a big difference for you; you’ll see,” he would tell me. It was difficult for me to see how joining an organization might affect me, so I resisted.
While applying for a sports medicine fellowship, I started heeding the advice. During every sports medicine elective, the preceptors would ask if I belonged to ACSM. Every physician I worked with in sports medicine attended the Annual Meetings and was amazed that I had not. They mentioned the medical presentations, the keynote lectures, and the camaraderie. I heard the same advice from physical therapists, podiatrists, and orthopedic surgeons. I succumbed to the peer pressure and joined the one organization recommended unanimously: ACSM.
During my fellowship, I attended my first ACSM conference. All attendees had one common goal: to learn more about sports medicine. I had been to other sports medicine conferences but nothing compared with ACSM’s meeting. For four days, I was inundated with the latest information in sports injuries, concussion treatment, team coverage, exercise physiology, nutrition, and research not yet published. All the presentations were educational and informative. More important, though, were the relationships I formed at ACSM. I met fellows from other parts of the country with interests similar to mine. I met clinicians involved in research that would impact my practice. I talked with physicians who worked with professional teams and Olympic committees from different countries.
Once I established links in the sports medicine community, I used those links to strengthen my career and practice. When my patients asked questions outside of my experience, or presented unique problems, I relied on my new acquaintances from ACSM to help me find an answer. No other organization offered the depth of prior experiences or the range of research subjects as ACSM.
In 2000, I left my private practice to pursue a career in teaching. I joined a family practice residency program to organize and teach nonoperative orthopedics and sports medicine to family practice residents in a farming community. There are no other sports medicine fellowship-trained or certified family physicians in Monterey County, CA. I was charged with developing a sports medicine program and teaching nonoperative orthopedics to family practice residents and undergraduate medical students in this setting. I quickly contacted other primary care sports medicine physicians I knew from ACSM to help me with this daunting task. I relied on the experience of others who had established a sports medicine program at a community-based residency program. Without the help of my ACSM colleagues, I could never have survived the first year in my new setting, let alone develop a new curricula.
The impact on my life and my career has been phenomenal. ACSM has touched many aspects of my life.
