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As a child in south Florida, Dr. Randy Schwartzberg was crazy about sports and loved to fix things.

He still does.

Now he primarily fixes knees and shoulders, many of which are hurt on the sports fields of Central Florida, where he stands out as a sports medicine physician and an enthusiastic fan.

He serves as team physician for a number of high schools, gymnastic facilities, as well as the elite gymnasts of the world renowned Cirque de Soleil.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Schwartzberg received his medical education at the University of Florida College of Medicine and served his internship and orthopedic surgery residency in the Orlando Regional Healthcare System, where he received the Resident of the Year Achievement Award in 1996.
By the time he finished residency, he knew he wanted to practice in the sports medicine area of orthopedics. He was selected for a sports medicine fellowship at “the mecca,” the esteemed American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala., studying under Dr. Lawrence J. Lemak.

His training was a sports enthusiast’s dream, and he relished his time as assistant team physician for Auburn, World League of American Football, Birmingham Bulls and Birmingham Barons while he was at the institute.

Following his training in Alabama, Schwartzberg had an opportunity to return to the Orlando area and go into practice at the Orlando Orthopeadic Center.

His commitment to sports medicine extends into academics and he serves as director of sports medicine education for the Orlando Regional Healthcare System orthopedic surgery residency program and was named Attending Physician of the Year in 2005. He gives frequent sports medicine presentation to physicians as well as other healthcare professionals.

Combining private practice with an academic responsibility supervising the training of young doctors at ORHS is a mix he really enjoys. He works with three fellows each year in the sports medicine program and continues to develop and work on research projects.

Friday nights are saved for football in Florida, where Schwartzberg is a fixture at local high school games. He is responsible for too many teams to cover by himself each week so enlists his fellows from the residency program to attend the games.

His group does all the high school teams’ physicals, sometimes as many as 200 to 300 pre-season evaluations, and donates all fees back to each school. There are no student athletic trainers; Schwartzberg treats the teams like professional organizations, making training room visits every few weeks, treating all their injuries and handling rehab “in house.”

The most significant change in the field of sports medicine over the last 10 years since he completed his training, Schwartzberg thinks, has been the ability to perform all shoulder surgeries arthroscopically, particularly repair to rotator cuff tears.

Arthroscopy allows an orthopedic surgeon to diagnose and treat injuries by providing a clear view of the inside of a joint through a small incision, utilizing a pencil-size instrument called an arthroscope. The scope contains optic fibers that transmit an image through a small camera to a television monitor, allowing the surgeon to thoroughly examine the area.

During the procedure, the surgeon can also insert surgical instruments through other small incisions to remove or repair damaged tissue.

Arthroscopic surgery is much less traumatic to the muscles, ligaments and the tissues, and can shorten the recovery process. Schwartzberg says it does not shorten the healing process, because the tissue is going to have to “do the same thing” and it still must have time to adhere and grow to the bone; it does lessen the pain and make recovery from a major incision much less traumatic.
The actual surgery on a shoulder injury by the arthroscopic method allows the surgeon an expanding understanding of the injury and an opportunity to do mini open repairs: diagnosis, decompression and minimizing painful hooks or spurs on the bone.

He has worked with a number of orthopedic surgeons in teaching labs demonstrating the benefits of this method.

In addition to shoulders, repairing knees one of the biggest responsibilities for orthopedic surgeons. In the United States, doctors annually see more than 95,000 tears to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a crucial stabilizer of the knee joint, and perform about 50,000 ligament reconstructions. More than 1.5 million knee arthroscopies are performed in this country each year.

Schwartzberg is excited about advances in science and technique that make repairing knees, and particularly ACL injuries, less invasive.

Although he treats a number of the more commonly occurring, more routine meniscus tears to the knees, he prefers the “pure sports medicine” aspect of repairing the ACL and other complex injuries. For 15 years, he has been doing ACL repairs arthroscopically, using alternative graft sources, such as hamstring tendons removed from the back of the thigh and bundled together, or allographs, cadaver tendons, with success.

Schwartzberg is hopeful about developments that he sees coming in sports medicine in the next decade, particularly in ACL injury prevention. He said there is a lot of research being done, especially for the teenage female athlete, who is four to five times as likely to injure an ACL as her male counterpart.

For all ACL injuries, he is excited about new instruments and biologic stimuli, which make success more predictable and stimulates tissue to heal more quickly. He is enthusiastic about biologic stimuli modifications and thinks that improvement in the influence of the biology of healing will have exciting results.

Along the way, he keeps busy nurturing the next generation of sports fan—his toddler son who, at only 17 months, sports a wardrobe of mini-jerseys with Wolverines, Gators and Lions emblazoned on the back.



September 2007

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