Curriculum

Our faculty members are committed to helping you build your medical knowledge, sharpening your patient care and procedural skills and providing mentoring that will help you make meaningful contributions to the sports medicine literature.

We’ll help you develop mastery in all areas of sports medicine practice, including:

• comprehensive surgical management of soft tissue injuries of the shoulder, knee, elbow and ankle
• taking a history and performing an appropriate physical examination for orthopaedic sports injuries
• differentiating between sports injuries that require immediate surgical treatment and those that can be treated nonoperatively
• understanding acute care of injuries that occur during athletic competition and handling them on the athletic field
• ordering and interpreting radiologic examinations that are used for diagnoses of sports injuries

Our training will help you fully understand the indications, risks and limitations of common procedures as well as therapeutic modalities offered in the department of physical therapy. You can expect to develop expertise in areas including:

• non-orthopaedic problems that occur in sports medicine
• the psychological effect of injuries on athletes
• sports equipment, particularly protective devices such as helmets, protective pads, knee braces and foot orthotics

You’ll gain clinical and operative experience rotating through ambulatory centers, office settings and major medical centers during the year. Our faculty members have extensive expertise in shoulder, knee, elbow, ankle and hip arthroscopy. 

Our rotations give you one-on-one experience with our faculty; each rotation is designed to allow an in-depth experience with your preceptor.

Team coverage is crucial to your training as a sports medicine specialist; it gives you substantial experience with high-level athletes, mentoring from our experienced team physicians and educational interactions with athletic training staff and players. 

We have two rotations that are unique to our program. They offer an additional level of training that you may not find in many other sports medicine fellowships:

Our program provides protected time and facilities for your research activities. 

Members of our department regularly participate in prospective clinical trials, anatomic and biomechanical studies, meta-analyses and other projects — and we have databases for cohort and case-control studies.

With the guidance of our faculty, you’ll learn to design, implement and interpret research studies. The types of research you can conduct are:

• basic bench research
• translational research
• epidemiologic and/or clinical studies
• clinical trials

You can conduct research supported by the Kenneth A. Krackow Research Laboratory.

Our alumni have published work in global peer-reviewed journals, and we expect you to work on a publishable research project throughout your year in our program.

As a fellow in our program, you can expect to attend meetings — sports medicine conferences, special quarterly lectures and journal club — that familiarize you with information that’s invaluable to developing your expertise in sports medicine.

Our curriculum will hone your skills in diagnostic and operative arthroscopy as well as open sports medicine procedures such as: 

• open shoulder stabilization
• ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction of the elbow
• distal biceps tendon repair
• medial and lateral ligament reconstruction
• patellar stabilization
• patellar tendon and Achilles tendon repairs

Our arthroscopy laboratory will play an integral role in your training. 

The time you spend in the lab will help you progress from the basic physics and hardware of arthroscopy to increasingly advanced techniques for the shoulder, knee and other body joints.

As the academic year progresses, our training will strengthen your abilities to a point at which you can mentor residents in diagnostic procedures, knot tying and mid-level arthroscopic surgical skills and procedures. 

We’ll hold several wet labs each year to address areas such as elbow arthroscopy and reconstruction, posterolateral knee reconstruction or ankle arthroscopy procedures.

Our arthroscopy lab owns a virtual reality knee and shoulder arthroscopic simulator that allows you to learn surgical skills at your own pace and gives you opportunities to perfect your skills outside the pressures and time constraints of the operating room.