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Have you ever had a comminuted fracture (where the bones is shattered into multiple pieces)?
Yes, more than once
Yes, once
No
Dr. William Hamilton, former attending orthopedic surgeon for the New York City Ballet, died on March 29. He was 90 years old.
The following is the obituary published in the New York Times, by Clay Risen:
Dr. William G. Hamilton, who as the attending orthopedic surgeon for New York City Ballet spent more than 40 years fixing bone spurs, tendinitis, bursitis, torn ligaments and what he called “the Nutcracker Fracture,” died on March 29 at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 90.
His wife, Linda Hamilton, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Ballet dancers may be the “athletes of God,” as Albert Einstein supposedly said. But until Dr. Hamilton came along, they were treated more like ethereal beings than physical bodies that could crack, tear and otherwise fall apart under the extreme and often unnatural pressures of repeated pliés and grand jetés.
In fact, it was George Balanchine, the choreographer who famously insisted that his dancers stoically work through their stubbed toes and sprained ankles, who asked Dr. Hamilton to become the first in-house doctor for the 80-plus members of New York City Ballet, in 1972.
Dr. Hamilton immediately said yes, though he knew nothing about ballet. He immersed himself in the art, attending weekend classes and becoming close to Balanchine and, later, the dancer and choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who in 1980 hired him to be the attending surgeon for American Ballet Theater as well.
A courtly 6-foot-3 Southerner, Dr. Hamilton became a favorite and even revered figure around Lincoln Center. He had a disarming bedside manner that put young dancers at ease when they came to him worried that a sprained ankle might end their career.
He kept a ballet barre in his examining room, and he was renowned for catching early signs of chronic, potentially debilitating problems just by asking a dancer to go through a few routine motions.
Early on, he realized that while dancers suffered the same kinds of injuries athletes did, they got them in obscure ways and places. He saw, for example, that the rapid movements required by Balanchine’s ballets came with the risk of foot and ankle injury, while the leaps and bounds more common under Mr. Baryshnikov were more threatening to the hips and knees.
“From the very beginning, I learned that although they get the same injuries as athletes, dancers are artists first,” he told Dance Magazine in 2011.
When Dr. Hamilton started out, in the early 1970s, there was no such thing as dance medicine, and indeed foot and ankle injuries were a largely understudied field of orthopedic medicine.
He built up both fields through lectures and journal articles in which he diagnosed previously understudied injuries; he was among the first to describe the Nutcracker Fracture, for example, which involves multiple breaks in the cuboid bone in the foot. He was president of the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society from 1992 to 1993, and today every sizable dance company in the country has an orthopedic surgeon on call.
“Bill was the king of orthopedic dance medicine,” Glenn Pfeffer, the co-director of the Cedars-Sinai/USC Glorya Kaufman Dance Medicine Center in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview.
Dr. Hamilton continued to perform surgery until he was 81 and consulted until a few years ago, long after most physicians would have hung up their scalpels.
“I would have retired a long time ago if it wasn’t for the dancers,” he said in a 2016 interview with the magazine Princeton Alumni Weekly. “It’s very rewarding because they love what they do. They just want to dance; they wouldn’t want to do anything else.”
William Garnett Hamilton did not set out to be a Manhattan doctor, let alone a balletomane. He was born on Jan. 11, 1932, in Altus, Okla., where his father, Milton Hamilton, was a salesman and his mother, Elizabeth (Garnett) Hamilton, was a homemaker.
The family moved to Shreveport, La., when he was very young. After his parents divorced, his mother remarried and moved to Portage, Wis., where her new husband owned a plastics manufacturing company.
William graduated from Princeton in 1954 with a degree in engineering, and after two years in the Army he joined his stepfather’s business in Wisconsin. He married and had a child; by his mid-20s, he said, he could see his entire life unfolding before him. He didn’t like what he saw.
Against his parents’ wishes that he stay to run the family company, he applied to medical school. He was accepted at Columbia, one of the few schools that took older students (he was 28 when he enrolled). He decided to focus on orthopedics—a field that he said was not unlike engineering, with muscles and joints standing in for ropes and levers. He graduated in 1964 and, after several years of residency, opened a practice in Midtown Manhattan in 1969.
In addition to his work with the two ballet companies, he provided the same services to the companies’ affiliated schools, the School of American Ballet and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and he consulted for numerous Broadway shows and New York sports teams, including the Knicks and the Yankees.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. He met his future third wife, Linda Homek, when she was a dancer with New York City Ballet. She later received a doctorate in psychology from Adelphi University, on Long Island. In 2000, she and Dr. Hamilton created a multidisciplinary wellness team, including a dietitian and a massage therapist, to care for the company’s dancers, a model that has since been adopted by other ballet companies.
Along with his wife, Dr. Hamilton is survived by his sister, Ann Kirk; his sons, William Jr. and Lewis; and three grandchildren.
Photo: Dr. Hamilton in his office in 2013, by Paul Kolnik via the NY Times
Behind the appointment: Orthopedics
An orthopedist is a kind of doctor that specializes in bones, joints, and muscles. This is who you go see after you get injured, or if you have a condition that affects how your joints/bones/muscles work (like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or scoliosis). So you might be going just for a follow up, but it’s likely you’re here because something’s hurting:(
Like most specialist appointments, this one starts with filling out a whole bunch of paperwork. Sometimes they even have a little picture of a body and you get to draw on it to say, “this hurts here!” Every orthopedics office I’ve been to (which is like 5, not even exaggerating) had an x-ray machine in the same building. The next step after paperwork is usually going to get an x-ray of whatever body part you’re there for. (post about x-rays coming soon!) Then you go hang out in an exam room and wait for the doctor to get your x-ray results and come in.
You should get your x-ray results right away. If you ask to see it, they’ll usually say yes, which I think is super cool. The doctor will probably ask you about when and how you got hurt, and what the pain is like. This can be a really hard question, so I try to think about it ahead of time! As in, how much does this hurt from 1 to 10, how would I describe what it feels like, what makes it worse, that kind of thing. Then the doctor will poke around the injured body part (literally) and gently move it to see what it does- sometimes they’ll do this to the whole limb too. This is probably going to hurt a little (sorry) but it’s important to help diagnose what’s happening. But if something hurts a lot or you’re not comfy being touched there, you should definitely speak up. After all, you’re here to get better!
The outcome of this appointment will probably be one or more of the following: -hmmm I’m not sure, let’s get an MRI (again, post on this coming soon!)
-here’s what’s going on, it’s nothing serious. Time for physical therapy! Or, I have no idea what’s going on, but we ruled out anything serious, time for physical therapy!
-Just be gentle to it and come back in a few weeks and we’ll see
-Here’s what crutches/cast/brace I suggest and how long to use them for
-We know what’s going on, and it will require surgery:/ (disclaimer, I haven’t gotten this outcome so I can’t elaborate, but I do know it’s a possibility)
-hmmmm referral to another specialist for a second opinion
Some final notes: even if the doctor is really gentle, you’ll probably be in extra pain after your appointment from the all the poking and prodding- I would consider preemptive painkillers, or bringing an ice pack for the ride home. Orthopedics does the diagnosis and deciding on treatment, but physical therapy is who does most of the actual treating (besides surgery). It’s likely you’ll get referred to PT regardless of what happened, so you’ll be seeing a lot more of them than your orthopedist. And just so you’re prepared, every orthopedist I’ve ever met seems to be in a huge hurry, so your appointment will probably be pretty fast. No matter what the outcome of your appointment is, I wish you the best of luck in your healing!
I get all warm and fuzzy when I see emerging tech actually being useful vs being a novelty.
created by printthinks [Instagram]
This splint was desgned for a patient as a preventive measure against osteoarthritis. This custom splint keeps the thumb in an abducted and comfortable position.
The casing itself was created using an Einscan Pro with 50 microns of maximum deviation while the fastening was constructed out of 2 rubber bands and hooks made with galvanized wire.
Pretty cool, huh?
I’m annoyed at how many different doctors I’ve been seeing lately. Why can’t I just have a normal healthy body? I should be thankful that I have the opportunity to actually visit the doctor’s with little to no cost but I hate having a body that always seems to have a problem.
When Doctors Don't Tell You Results
When Doctors Don’t Tell You Results
There have been a handful of times that I have had tests done and found out the results through other means, not from the doctor ordering the test. Some have been minor, while others, like failing to mention my hearing loss at 10 years old, have been major. Its been a while since I’ve had to deal with this, but, I’m dealing with it now. Back in January, I went to see an orthopedist, supposedly…
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Waiting for the orthopedic surgeon! 😨
