Fox 12 Good Day Living’s Stephanie Kralevich caught up with Shane Hanzlik, M.D., board-certified orthopedic surgeon at ROC, to discuss common weekend warrior injuries.
Dr. Hanzlik shares the knee, ankle, and sports injuries he commonly treats, when patients should seek care, and how non-surgical options like medication, injections, and physical therapy can support recovery.
Video Transcript:
Stephanie Kralevich: Doctors at Regenerative Orthopedic Center, or ROC, say they see an increase in weekend warrior injuries this time of year. Today we are talking to board certified orthopedic surgeon Shane Hanzlik about these types of injuries and how they’re treated. Today we’re talking weekend warrior injuries. What are the most common types of weekend warrior injuries you see here?
Shane Hanzlik: By far, it’s going to be knee and ankle injuries. So usually the most problematic one is going to be a knee meniscus where somebody that’s not that active during the week gears up and gets ready to go play basketball or tennis on the weekend and they’ll do a twisting motion and sure enough, feel a little snap or twinge in their knee and ends up being a torn meniscus and we have to do something about that usually.
Stephanie Kralevich: You do a lot of shoulder surgeries, hips, knees. When does someone need surgery? When should they not be pushing past the pain and they need to see a doctor?
Shane Hanzlik: The obvious things where if you can’t move the extremity very well without it just killing you, that’s a bad… Yeah, you got to come and see the doctor. But if it’s really preventing you from having full range of motion of that joint and especially for more than let’s say one week, you should probably have it evaluated.
Stephanie Kralevich: But you have a lot of patients who come in and you say, “Oh, we don’t need surgery. We can treat this more conservatively.”
Shane Hanzlik: For sure. Probably 80% of our patients are non-operative and most of those are things that we can take care of with simple medicines or injections and sometimes sending them to physical therapy.
Stephanie Kralevich: How important is physical therapy?
Shane Hanzlik: It’s probably going to be the mainstay of not only not so much treating it right at the moment, but making sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.
Stephanie Kralevich: The recovery times are a lot shorter nowadays for these types of procedures.
Shane Hanzlik: And that’s really because we’ve learned that the body needs to move and wants to move and you heal better if you move it. So it’s very rare now that we’ll actually immobilize something for more than a couple days. Early protected motion is kind of a theme that gets everybody better.
Stephanie Kralevich: Motion is the lotion, right?
Shane Hanzlik: Exactly. Whoever coined it, genius.
Stephanie Kralevich: Dr. Hanzlik, thanks so much. To learn more about orthopedic care and recovery at Regenerative Orthopedic Center, visit rocpdx.com.