Skiing may be a big source for orthopedic injuries, but that doesn’t stop Birmingham orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist James Flanagan, Jr., from hitting the slopes in Colorado several times a year.
“One day I was at the Vail hospital — a friend of mine had a heart attack on the slope and I had to take him to the hospital — and talking to the ER physicians; they said they had had 99 orthopedic cases come in that day. So skiing is pretty risky to tear up your knees or break your legs. So far I’ve only dislocated my shoulder once and sprained my thumb.”
Flanagan, who is a partner at Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Specialists, PC, in Birmingham, has been skiing since he was about 30.
“I got involved going to the Cumberland Law School (Samford University) alumni meetings,” he explained. “They had a ski meeting every year, and they would ask me to come talk about some medical malpractice topic. I started skiing with all those guys, and I continue to ski with some of those lawyers on a regular basis.”
After skiing at many different locations around the country, about 12 years ago, Flanagan bought a townhouse in the Vail/Beaver Creek area of Colorado. “I hope to move out there and ski a lot someday,” he said. When there’s no snow, he also enjoys mountain biking, fly-fishing, and riding motorcycles.
What about the stereotype of doctors playing golf? “I play golf one time a year whether I need to or not,” he joked. “I’m not very good. It takes too long.”
Instead, closer to home, he plays racquetball and mountain bikes at Oak Mountain. He also does some fly-fishing in local lakes for bream and bass, or goes to north Georgia to fish for trout. “I don’t get to do as much of that as I like; summer’s a busy time for us.”
That’s because Flanagan specializes in sports medicine, and summer sports mean summer injuries. An Auburn graduate who studied medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, Flanagan came to Birmingham for his residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and stayed on. He’s been in practice in Birmingham for 30 years.
In the late 1970s, Flanagan’s friend Joe Campbell, who was the head coach at Leeds High School, asked the young orthopedist to help him take care of his teams.
“I have continued to take care of high school athletes for the whole time since then, and I enjoy doing that,” he said. “I enjoy getting out on Friday nights and heading out to the football games and taking care of the kids. The kids are fun to take care of, and there’s always something new.”
So summer and fall are busy with summer sports and high school football. For the past couple of years, the doctors in Flanagan’s practice have also been the official team physicians of the Alabama Steeldogs arena football team, which makes spring and summer even busier.
Flanagan’s other specialty is total joint surgery. He did a fellowship in joint replacement surgery in London, England, with the famous English joint replacement surgeon Michael Freeman.
He became interested in orthopedics because, he said, “I just like working with my hands and seeing immediate gratification in treating a problem.” While in medical school at Baylor, he also was involved in some orthopedic research involving early investigation into porous coatings for prostheses. He was hooked. Today he’s a fellow of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. An active member of the Trinity Medical Center medical staff, he is also a clinical assistant professor at the University of Alabama Medical Center. He also served six years as chief of the Department of Orthopedics at Trinity Medical Center (formerly Baptist Montclair).
A lot of things have changed in his 30 years of orthopedic practice. “Thirty years ago, you’d have a hospital full of people you had operated on,” he said. “Nowadays, almost everyone has outpatient surgery and goes home. Of course, the technology of things we can do regarding utilization of implants and fixing fractures and putting knees and shoulders together has just been terrific, and allowed us to do a lot more things today than in the past. And we can do them a lot more easily for the patient using minimally invasive procedures, which makes it easier for folks to recover.”
Flanagan has also watched his family grow during those 30 years. He and his wife, Pam, have two children. Adam is studying engineering at UAB and working his way through school as a scrub tech at Trinity. Heather is assistant state attorney general for the state of Florida. Unlike their father, who came to skiing late in life, they learned to ski before they started elementary school and still make a trip to Vail to ski with the family when they can get away. And if they sustain any injuries on the slopes, they’ll have an accomplished orthopedist on hand to help.
August 2007
