Dr. Vailas featured in the Nashua Telegraph on sports injuries

This past weekend Dr. Jim Vailas was featured in a Nashua Telegraph article on sports injuries. Follow this link to read the original article, or read below.

Specialists give care to injured athletes

The reason sports medicine has become such a booming business is pretty simple: There are more sports and more athletes playing them.

Gone are the days when coaches would tape up an injury, have the athlete take two aspirin and check back with him or her at practice the next day.

Now there are trainers, and beyond that, the physicians who have become sports medicine specialists. At nearly every high school and medical practice, there are professionals who specialize in athletics.

“Sports and exercise is a huge part of our society,” said Dr. Chris Couture, a sports medicine specialist who works out of Merrimack. “It’s what we do. The intensity of kids sports is a lot higher than it was when we were young.”

Enter Dr. James Vailas, a noted local physician who specializes in sports medicine, as well as shoulder and knee reconstruction. As one would expect, his qualifications are impeccable, as the Dartmouth Medical School grad was once voted New Hampshire Magazine’s top sports medicine doctor and top orthopedic surgeon.

Vailas has tracked the history of the sports physician, and he said the seeds were planted more than 40 years ago when a famous NFL athlete developed chronic knee problems.

“Historically, look way back,” he said. “When were we starting to cover sports injuries? It started way back when Joe Namath was playing.”

Namath, as most football fans know, had chronic knee woes that cut short his career. But his woes brought a physician, Dr. James Nicholas, to the forefront as the pioneer of sports medicine. Nicholas operated on Namath’s knees four times, and was the founder of the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

But he was the team doctor for the New York Jets, Knicks and Rangers, and that, Vailas says, is the key, setting the trend for today’s sports medicine – becoming team doctors. It’s a requirement in some medical fellowships, Vailas said.

“What’s sports medicine? It’s basically being around athletes,” he said. “It’s basically training (the physicians) in something that’s not specialized. … You’re able to identify the injury and get the athletes to the right specialists.”

In that vein, Vailas is the team physician for the Manchester Monarchs, as well as co-founder and president of the board of directors for the New Hampshire Musculoskeletal Institute. The nonprofit organization specializes in musculoskeletal care, sports medicine, and educating parents, coaches and athletes in creating a safer sports environment.

It all symbolizes the renewed importance of the sports medicine industry.

“Jim and I were the next wave of that,” said Dr. Dan O’Neill, of Plymouth. “I hate to say this, but it’s a money thing. As athletes’ value went up, sports became a bigger deal. Recreational athletes became more serious.”

And the value of athletic scholarships became a premium. Thus, more sports and student-athletes at schools, more games, more injuries.

And more need for science to help out.

“Research in sports medicine is a new reality,” said Laura Decoster, executive director of the NHMI. “It’s a lot more of a formal science than it used to be.”

But the basis of that science is a simple one.

“We want kids to have fun,” O’Neill said. “We don’t want them to have problems later on in life.”