By Ansley Franco
When you speak, you likely use your hands to emphasize your words. If you communicate through sign language, your hands become your primary voice. Beyond function, our hands are an intimate part of the body, deeply connected to our brains and playing a vital role in daily life. That connection drew David Woods, MD to specialize in hand and upper extremity orthopedic surgery.
A Birmingham native, Woods recently returned to his hometown after completing medical school, residency and a fellowship to join OrthoSports Associates, focusing on wrist and elbow care.
“When you grow up here, and then come back and treat so many – whether it’s family friends, people you know, people you don’t know — you learn more about the community around you, and I’ve been really grateful for that,” Woods said.
His journey to specializing in hand and upper extremity care was not always straightforward. From the age of nine, Woods admired his uncle, an ER doctor in south Alabama. He first person Woods had ever known who truly loved his job and found excitement in his daily work. This inspired Woods to pursue a career in emergency medicine, and given Birmingham’s strong ties to medical education, it felt like a natural choice.
During his medical school rotations, Woods discovered a passion not just for surgery, but also for clinic visits and building relationships with patients. That passion for creating a medical plan with the patient was solidified during a summer in Kenya where he observed orthopedic surgeries daily.
Many patients Woods saw arrived with severe injuries from Boda Boda accidents. These are the bicycle and motorcycle taxis that are common in East Africa, and the people who drive them are often the primary providers for their families.
“They’re the ones that the kids rely on to get back into the workforce and to put food on the table,” Woods said. “Just to see how drastically you could change not only their outlook, but their whole family’s outlook, and restore their function, getting them back to do the things they needed to do to take care of their families, had a pretty profound influence on me.”
The ability to take someone who was completely incapacitated and restore that function is what drew Woods away from becoming an ER doctor and into orthopedics.
“What was cool about it is that orthopedics usually works more in the bone side of the body: fracture fixation, joint replacement and those kinds of things,” Woods said. “The unique side of hand surgery is that you do all those things. But on top of that, you get a lot of training on the plastic surgery side of the upper extremity as well. It made me a more versatile surgeon.”
By integrating the specialized skills of orthopedics and plastic surgery, Woods’s approach to hand surgery allows him to treat a wide range of injuries and conditions from sports injuries to carpal tunnel and elderly degenerative upper extremity changes.
Improved technology, such as portable ultrasounds, has allowed him to perform tendon sheath injections and intraarticular injections in previously hard-to-reach places, saving time and resources while improving convenience for the patient.
“One of the biggest advances in the field has come in the area of wrist arthroplasty. The incisions are now much, much smaller than they used to be,” Woods said.
Woods emphasizes that surgery is not always the first solution he recommends for upper extremity issues. “Sometimes patients think that because you’re a surgeon, you’re automatically going to prescribe surgery,” he said. “But at our practice, we try to make it a priority that when patients see us, there are usually so many options we can offer before surgery, and there are so many nonoperative management options.”
