5 Questions with Dr. Matthew Gammons, AMSSM President

May 2, 2017 by 1 Comment

Dr. Matt Gammons, outgoing AMSSM president. Photo courtesy http://www.rrmc.org

May — we’ve already arrived in May.

One-third of the way through 2017; I can’t believe it.

But it’s really here, and with this new month comes one of the premier fixtures of the annual American sports medicine calendar:  the AMSSM 26th Annual Meeting, to be held in San Diego.

The meeting each year represents, among so many other things, a time for the organization to come together and witness the changing of the guard:  the end of the term for one president, and the beginning for another.

This year AMSSM will be sending off Dr. Matt Gammons, who has served admirably since the Dallas meeting in 2016.  We caught up with him just before he was taking off from his home in the Green Mountains of Vermont to head to the sunny shores of the Pacific to ask him how his year went, suss out his Tweeting skills, and learn what it’s like to be lost in Chile.

Read on!

____________________________________

1. CJSM: How did your year as AMSSM president go? What were the high points? Did you face any significant challenges this year?

Matt Gammons (MG): Overall the year was great. I really like the way we run our executive committee. I had 2 years to learn the ropes from the presidents before me (Drs. Chris Madden and Jon Divine) before taking over. Their leadership and wisdom made me feel more comfortable moving into the president position. In addition our staff is wonderful. They make the process much more streamlined, and they were my real lifeline. There is no way I could have done this job without them.

While our organization has many things to be proud of I think getting the Collaborative Research Network up and going along with hiring our research director, Stephanie Kliethermes, is fantastic.  Moving forward this will allow our organization to do some amazing work in the field of sports medicine.  Organizationally, the biggest challenge we have is our growing size. Read more of this post

Filed under General Interest, Medical Conferences Tagged with

Coming Up: AMSSM San Diego!

April 25, 2017 by 2 Comments

Extracurricular options at #AMSSM17 San Diego

In a little more than a week, our affiliated society — the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) — is hosting its annual meeting in San Diego(#AMSSM17).  I must admit this year, more than most, the date has crept up on me! I still have to  advance my preparation for different obligations I will have on the ground once I am in San Diego. I have yet to turn an accepted abstract into a poster — which, as many of you know, CJSM will publish in the May 2017 issue [CJSM has historically published each year’s AMSSM conference research and case abstracts — for an example check out the May 2016 issue here]

At least I’m already registered (if you’re not, you can do as well — just head here).

The conference promises, as it always does, a great lineup of speakers and presentations.  Several names in that lineup will be familiar to readers of our pages.  With just a casual glance I see Jonathan Finnoff, Jon Drezner, Greg Myer, Matt Gammons, Avery Faigenbaum and Andrea Stracciolini.

The AMSSM’s biggest ‘problem’ usually lies in choosing among many good speakers who may be going on stage concurrently!!!  I’ll be making some very difficult choices……

Editors for CJSM, BJSM and Sports Health will be presenting at #AMSSM17

If you are going and starting to fill in your calendars, be sure to highlight Friday May 12, from 0700 – 0745 for “ICL 21 — Research Track: Secrets to Success — Getting Published in Premier Sports Medicine Journals,” a round table with editors from CJSM, BJSM and Sports Health. This was a very well received session at last year’s meeting, and it promises to be bigger and better this year.

In addition to the upcoming annual conference, AMSSM has been on my mind a lot recently.  With the publication of our May issue in a little more than a week, we’ll be releasing a new AMSSM position statement on ‘The Primary Care Sports Medicine Fellowship Standards of Excellence.’  We’ll have a podcast interview with the lead author, AMSSM’s Irfan Asif, published concurrently on iTunes when the May issue goes live.

Soon, we’ll be live tweeting on the ground — keep your eyes open on our Twitter feed @CJSMonline for all that’s new with #AMSSM17 in San Diego!

See you there.

Filed under General Interest, Medical Conferences Tagged with

How do you evaluate your ACL reconstructed patients? The CJSM Podcast.

April 10, 2017 by 1 Comment

I have an interest in patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).  In fact, one of the manuscripts I have published in the pages of CJSM addresses the reliability and validity of a pediatric back pain PROM (the Micheli Functional Scale).

I read with great interest, therefore, work recently published in CJSM on another PROM, the ACL Quality of Life (QOL) questionnaire: Validity, Reliability and Responsiveness of the ACL QOL Measure: A Continuation of its Overall Validation.

When I approached the lead author, Mark Lafave, about doing a possible podcast on this study, he demurred. The person I really needed to talk with was the his mentor, and the developer of the measure 30 years ago: Dr. Nicholas Mohtadi.

Dr. Mohtadi is an orthopaedic surgeon and Director of the Sports Medicine Centre at the University of Calgary, Alberta Canada.  He is a past president of CJSM’s affiliated society, the Canadian Academy of Sport and Exercise Medicine.  He is also on the CJSM editorial board and has been a prolific author in our pages these last 26 years.

He made for a wonderful guest on the podcast.  Check it out, and don’t forget you can see all the CJSM podcasts and sign up for the iTunes feed by going here.

 

Filed under CJSM Podcasts, General Interest, Patient Outcome Measures Tagged with , ,

IOC Injury Prevention Conference, Monaco

March 30, 2017 by 2 Comments

The setting for IOC Injury Prevention Conference, photo Osman Ahmed

Where do I begin?

The IOC World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport took place in Monaco a couple of weeks ago (16 – 18 March).

It was one of the best conferences I have ever attended.

Drawing from clinicians across the globe, the conference packed in ‘not-to-be-missed’ sessions over the course of the three days.  The issues ranged from prevention of ACL injuries to the best treatment of tendinopathies; preventing sudden cardiac death to addressing the scourge of physical and sexual abuse in sports.

South African friends (L to R): Jon Patricios, Ross Tucker, Wayne Viljoen, Phatho Zondi

The lecturers were an impressive array of clinicians, many of whose names will be familiar to readers of this CJSM blog or the journal itself: Roald Bahr organized the proceedings and talked about the challenges of screening for athletes at risk of injury; past AMSSM presidents Jonathan Drezner and Cindy Chang gave keynote addresses, as did the esteemed Willem van Mechelen; Osman Ahmed and a panel of others gave a very informative presentation on the uses of social media in sports medicine.  The list goes on.

I can’t do justice to the full conference, if only because of the necessary limitation of ‘concurrent sessions’ — with so much content to cover, the organizers understandably needed to schedule sessions aside from the keynote speeches concurrently.  How to choose when there may be two or three talks one wants to see at the same time? Read more of this post

Filed under General Interest, Injury Prevention, Medical Conferences

← Older posts

Newer posts →