Allen F. Anderson, MD - Tackling Sports Medicine

Allen F. Anderson, MD
Tackling Sports Medicine
By KELLY PRICE 

It takes one to know one.

For Allen Anderson, MD, treating young athletes with sport injuries in his orthopedic practice has a déjà vu quality.

He remembers how it felt to participate on the playing fi eld. His experience and training give him a thorough understanding of the unique needs of athletes regarding their treatment and the prevention of injuries.

As a youth, Anderson was part of a variety of athletic teams, suiting up for baseball, football, track, and wrestling during his school days at Percy Priest Elementary, Battle Ground Academy and the University of Tennessee.

He served as Captain of the BGA football team and was a TSSAA football All-Star, a champion wrestler and ... not surprisingly ... voted "Most Athletic" in high school.

It wasn’t all fun and games along the way, though. Anderson also applied himself to his studies to earn his medical degree from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. He returned to Nashville for a residency in orthopedics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he came under the infl uence of revered local orthopedist, Brant Lipscomb, Sr., MD.

Lipscomb, universally known as "Pinky," served as Anderson’s mentor, guiding him in his orthopedics training and eventually to certifi cation in the subspecialty of Sports Medicine.

Lipscomb was a “kind of pioneer in orthopedic sports medicine,” Anderson said, recalling the doctor was a fi xture on the sidelines as team physician for a number of local schools.

With Lipscomb’s encouragement, Anderson developed a keen interest in treating shoulder and knee injuries and ligament reconstruction. Today, in his practice at the Tennessee Orthopaedic Alliance’s office at Saint Thomas Hospital, he works on many of Middle Tennessee’s young athletes who need adolescent anterior cruciate reconstruction and cartilage repair

“We try to see them as quickly as possible after the injury, hopefully on the same day as it occurs,” he said.

Anderson is internationally known for developing a method to reconstruct the ACL in children and for determining standards for measuring outcomes from these procedures.

He recalled that when he was fi rst in his orthopedics training, “We didn’t have good outcomes from surgeries; there was hesitancy about operating because of concern about injury to the child’s growth plate.  Usually we hoped to delay surgery as long as was possible.

“After one young patient was permanently injured during the period he was waiting for surgery, I realized that we needed to develop a new operation that could help us accomplish the desired result without endangering the growth plate,” he said.

The operation Anderson developed was first used in 1993 on a gymnast from Oklahoma. She went on to become a Level 10 gymnast in college, he pointed out proudly.

Anderson has published more than 70 scientific articles about sports medicine in books and various medical journals and has had 17 scientific exhibits at national and international orthopedic meetings.

Appointed as an associate editor of the American Journal of Sports Medicine and a member of the medical publishing Board of Trustees for the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM), Anderson has received the Hughston Award for the most outstanding scientific paper published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Anderson serves as chairman of the International Knee Document Committee, which sets the standards used by orthopedic surgeons around the world to evaluate results of treatment. He is also chairman of the AOSSM Research Scientific Advisory Committee, which helps sports medicine physicians conduct scientifi c research in this country, and internationally; and he is co-chairman of the Knee Committee of the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopaedic Sports Medicine.

Anderson has held leadership positions in the prestigious Herodicus Society — an elite group of American, Canadian and European orthopedists whose name is based on the probability that Herodicus was apparently something between a physician and therapist trainer several thousand years ago.

He holds the certifi cate of added qualifi cations of sports medicine by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the accrediting board for orthopedic surgeons in the United States. As a result of his contribution to sports medicine, Anderson was selected as examiner and test writer for the general orthopedic boards.

Anderson and his wife, Candy, have three sons who have branched into careers in orthodontics, orthopedics, and the stock market.

Despite his scientifi c and publishing work, as well as a busy practice and full operating schedule, Anderson still stays physically active … although no longer in team sports. Now, he thoroughly enjoys his favorite hobby fl y fi shing in lakes and streams around the world. He recently traveled with his sons to the Northwest for a fly fishing vacation in the backcountry of Alaska.

“There is something about the beautiful, pristine wilderness — with no telephones — that keeps calling me,” he observed.

If he casts with the same skill, determination
and enthusiasm as he practices medicine, Anderson
probably ended up with a lot of Alaskan salmon,
char, trout and grayling taking his hook this
summer.

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