Education for Patients > Exercise is Medicine™ > Dr. Julie Bishop
What if there was one prescription that could prevent and treat dozens of diseases?
Julie Bishop, MD
Assistant Professor of Clinical Orthopaedics
I truly believe that prevention is always the best medicine and I am fully supportive of research and techniques that embrace this motto. As a sports medicine doctor I try to incorporate exercise as prevention into how I live my own life and I do believe that as doctors, we should try to express this to our patients. However, as a surgeon, I primarily see patients when they are past the point of prevention. They present to me with tendon tears in the shoulder or cartilage tears in the knee that often require surgical intervention. Interestingly, I see a common misconception among many patients that exercise actually caused their problem. After they recover, they are hesitant to return to sporting activities for fear of injuring themselves again. This is exactly the attitude I try to change in my patients, as I believe staying fit will instead prevent the return of the problem.
When injuries occur they can be due to age-related wear and tear, or just taking the wrong step at the wrong time and falling. If the injury is surgical, the appropriate surgery is undertaken and the appropriate rehabilitation program is chosen for the postoperative course. Once recovery is complete, it is vital to build a long-term exercise program for the patient, which takes into account their specific injury. Patients who undergo repairs of tendon tears in the shoulder need to maintain good shoulder health! Keeping their shoulders strong and limber is the best medicine to prevent future problems. However, their exercise program needs to be tailored to their unique injury. Maybe they can’t go back to extreme power lifting, but, they can certainly maintain a strengthening program at a lower level. A patient with cartilage tears in the knee needs to keep that knee moving and strong after surgery. Inactivity can lead to weakness, atrophy and poor joint nutrition. This is a setup for future problems. Perhaps marathon running is not the best choice for this patient, but there are many other great exercise choices which will help them accomplish the same goal.
In essence, our goal for our patients postoperatively is to return to a level of fitness that they can enjoy. Having a surgical sports injury is not a sentence to a life of inactivity. However it does inspire us to determine why the injury may have occurred and then design a fitness program that will be protective and beneficial to that body part. So although they may have suffered a setback, we hope they can come back stronger and better and learn good solid habits to prevent future injuries.
