Dr. Thomas Graham, a world-renowned hand surgeon, health care executive, author, inventor and entrepreneur, is the inaugural Physician-in-Chief of the Lehigh Valley Orthopedic Institute (LVOI), one of the country’s largest specialty destinations for Musculoskeletal care.
Dr. Graham's practice is recognized as the premier destination for care of the professional athlete’s hand and wrist. The master surgeon has served as the Hand Surgery Consultant, Team Physician or Medical Director for numerous professional sports teams in the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA and the PGA Tour.
Tom joined SportsJam with Doug Doyle to talk about his amazing career in sports and current role with Lehigh Valley Health Network.
"I highly honored to work with and among some of the most advanced, sophisticated and caring individuals in all our specialty. We have about 200-hundred providers, about 13-hundred folks in all who are dedicated to keeping you moving, keeping you comfortable, and having you reach your goals.
Many of the greatest athletes in the world are under Dr. Graham's care and with sports being such big business, he's fully ware of what is at stake for these elite athletes.
"When you're taking care of individuals whose number of their back and a lot of numbers on their check, you are well aware of the implications. However, I think perhaps why so few of us do so much proportionally is that you have to drown all that out. First of all they are a person. They happen to be a player, that's their job but that day they are a patient. That's what you have to think about the doctor-patient relationship and drown out all the noise, the media, Las Vegas, and the calls you get from somebody who has a fantasy team and read your name in the paper and wants to know what's going on. The secret is you are there to assist an individual who requires your services and hopefully you can draw upon your special experience to help them reach that level of performance that they require."
Why does Dr. Graham think there are so many injuries in today's sports world?
"I remember watching a basketball court because we always had a great seats courtside because doctors always had to sit close or be on the sideline of a football game, and I swear from those experiences in the 80's, 90's to today, it looks like there's a lot less room out there. There hasn't been a change in the dimension and there hasn't been a change in the number of players, but what has changed. The players are bigger and they're faster. I think when you have combined spaces like in these individuals with the training regiments, with the dedication, with the sports science, they are getter from point A to point B a lot faster. Linemen are running 4.6 40's. I just think that something has to give, it's physics.
Dr. Graham says despite attempts to make sports safer, he believes the proliferation of injuries will continue.
I have a friend and former patient Phil Mickelson who said how about if your employer was making your workplace more treacherous. He was referring to lengthening golf course and growing the grass deeper. There's changes that are going on that continue to try and challenge our athletes. There's been rules changes and things like that. On the positive side, we're utilizing sports science so much more effectively to understand the physics of that. Maybe the most obvious is what we've learned about helmet design in football. I just think we're going to continue to be somewhat prone to this escalation of injuries, probably emphasized more because it seems like there's billions of dollars of quarterbacks on the shelf. They're not slacking off. When I started in this people came back to spring training 15 pounds overweight and smoking. They used spring training to get in shape. That is not the case anymore. The training is year-round because the money is so great and what's on the line is so great for these athletes. So, they continue to be disciplined. We in the surgical community have to keep upping our game."
Known as one of the top medical innovators, Dr. Graham has extensive clinical expertise in surgery of the hand, wrist and elbow with special concentration on complicated reconstruction after trauma, complex elbow disorders and congenital hand surgery. He was the first Chief Innovation Officer at the Cleveland Clinic and has more than 60 patents.
"Most of my work has been in the medical device space, developing implants that treat fractures or to replace degenerative joints and things like that. Obviously, I'm a hand, wrist and elbow surgeon who invented one of the most commonly-used elbow prothesis. Innovation is reducing transcendent thought to practice, putting ideas to work. In our business, we like to say there's mission-driving innovation because you're trying to extend and improve human life."
Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 60’s and 70’s, Tom was enjoying the sports scene. The Steelers won four Super Bowls and the Pirates grabbed two World Series titles in the 70's. Two of Dr. Graham's sports heroes were Pirates Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente and golf legend Arnold Palmer. In the 80’s and 90’s, Palmer became a patient as well as a good friend. And in the 2000’s Arnold Palmer and Dr. Graham became partners in founding the Arnold Palmer SportsHealth Center in Baltimore.
"My folks grew up in the Latrobe and Ligonier area of Pennsylvania, where Arnold resided even at the time of his death. Arnold had so many attributes that should be celebrated and the fact that they resided in one man is still amazing, those being humility, sportsmanship and gentility. He was an unbelievable philanthropist and business man. Sometimes I thought he was more proud of his piloting skills than his golf skills. I think he would smile if he heard me say that."
The world-renowned doctor has trained hundreds of Orthopedic Surgery Residents and Hand Surgery Fellows, while also serving as a Program Director at both levels. Dr. Graham's passion to help others became even greater after a near-death experience in 2012. Fortunately, professionals at his own hospital at the time, Cleveland Clinic, were able to save his life.
"I was the sickest man on the face of the earth for a couple of years, hospitalized from October of 2012 to April of 2014 with necrotizing pancreatitis. It's a very rare but uniformly fatal problem. It took me 21 operations to come back and boy you do learn a lot."
After earning his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Williams College, Dr. Graham received his Medical Degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He completed a Residency in Orthopedic Surgery at the University of Michigan and a Fellowship in Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery at the Indiana Hand Center, with additional training in Elbow Surgery at Mayo Clinic. He also completed a two-year Executive Management Program in Healthcare Administration, jointly sponsored by Cleveland Clinic and the Weatherhead School of Business of Case Western Reserve University. Graham’s leadership of specialty institute-driven system integration has fostered success at some of the largest Musculoskeletal practices across the country (Cleveland, Baltimore and New York) while maintaining focus on facilitated access, clinical outcomes and patient experience. These validated strategies are particularly relevant when approaching integration at-scale across expanded geographies against the backdrop of today’s healthcare transformation.
You can SEE the entire SportsJam interview with Dr. Thomas Graham here.
