Montreal's Shriners Hospitals offers injured youth comprehensive sports medicine

About a year ago, 16-year-old Alison Koeppe had an operation to fix her knee.

The young runner, who plays soccer and basketball, tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and knew surgery would help, but she wasn't looking forward to it at all.

"I was scared because it was my first time doing the surgery," said Koeppe, a student at Lower Canada College in Montreal's west end.

And then after, she had a lot more on her mind. She wondered if she would be prepared to get back into sports while worrying she might get injured again. But now she's back on the horse.

"I had a track meet last week," Koeppe said. "Now I have a basketball tournament."

That's thanks to the interdisciplinary sports medicine program at the Shriners Children's Canada hospital in Montreal.

The program is focused on offering personalized care, said Dr. Thierry Pauyo. He's an orthopedic surgeon and the director of sports medicine at the Shriners. He operated on Keoppe. 

He said the program is aimed at helping any young person who has been injured while being active. No referral is required. It's free and patients and their families can book an appointment online.

"Kind of like a 360-degree treatment and we're going to touch all the spheres of their life affected by their injury," said Pauyo.

The team includes a nutritionist, sports psychologists, physiotherapists, a social worker and more. The hospital's motion analysis centre is also there to help with rehabilitation. The centre analyzes movements, then develops treatments and exercises to help improve those movements.

"There's really a big team around us, really to help the kids heal," Pauyo said.

"We know that when they get hurt, when they come to see us for a knee problem, it's not just their knee we're going to treat, we're going to treat the whole person."

More than 60 million children and teens are active in organized sports across North America, Shriners Canada said in a news release.

This is a good thing, the release says, but it also means the number of injuries is on the rise. For example, the number of ACL injuries has nearly doubled annually in active adolescents over the past two decades, it says.

Now Shriners is offering this comprehensive pediatric sports medicine in an effort to address "an important gap in care as very few specialists are trained to address sports medicine injuries in children and teens, and adult surgeons are often reluctant to treat them due to their smaller anatomies, open growth plates and different psychosocial needs," the release said.

The Shriners pediatric sports medicine team will also go into schools, sports clubs and rehab clinics to talk about injury prevention. 

The team wants to build relationships with those places to follow children and teens after their injuries, ensuring they can return to play and sport.

The hospital stresses that you don't have to be a star athlete to get help at Shriners.

"One of our priorities is to ensure that we extend care closer to home for the benefit of the children and teenagers we treat and their families," says Jacques Boissonneault, a Shriners administrator, in the news release.

"Within this initiative, we are extending our sports medicine expertise into the community.