Carving your own path: Sports Medicine with Dr. Matt Davis

Not only because of the medical experience, but we got a chance to meet your mom and that's one of the reasons you're here.

That's right.

I used that in my KU interview. I said that KU is the reason that I exist. Hi, everybody, and welcome to the podcast. This is Generations md. My name is Stephanie and I'm joined here by my colleague, Dr. Sarah Davis, who's also my mother. And today we have a guest.

She always has a very special guest, but today we have a guest.

We have not only my mother, but my father here. Welcome to the podcast again, back by.

Popular demand, Dr. Matthew Davis.

Hey there. Thank you for having me back. I know my last visit on the pod didn't go quite as planned.

Yeah. So if you're new around here, we had him on the podcast last year.

And I imagine some sort of like, video clip. Cut back to this. My, my, my visit last time with some sort of sad trombone.

The worst podcast guest ever was the title of that.

But we've decided that we're very forgiving and we're gonna let him try for some redemption.

That is the goal. So what we want to hear today is we want to hear about you. We want to hear about your journey. Our listeners would love to hear just more about sports medicine. Give us, give yourself an introduction about where you are now and then we'll kind of walk it back a little bit.

So in terms of sports medicine, I'm a primary care. I practice primary care sports medicine medicine, which for your listeners involves non operative orthopedics. So it involves diagnosis, treatment of musculoskeletal injuries and I do not operate. So I'm an internist. I also help treat athletes with general medical conditions and also deal with things like sports cardiology, where we do screenings of athletes to make sure it's safe from a cardiac perspective. We do things like concussion management as well. So we do everything in sports. We do sports nutrition, everything in sports that doesn't involve operating. So it's a little bit of a, of a different twist on things.

You're the guy who tells me that I can't play anymore.

Well, no, what I tell you is, let's try and get you back as quick as we can. I mean, that's the easy. That would be easy. You wouldn't need me to do that. If you're hurt, you say, well, then just stop playing. No. Which I'm there to do is help get you back playing as quickly as possible and do things that maybe will allow you to get back as Quickly as possible. But at any rate, my main venue for practicing sports medicine now is in the collegiate level where I serve as one of the team physicians on the primary care side of things for SMU, and I've been doing that now for probably 15 years or so. And I do other things in the world of sports medicine on an ongoing basis as it pertains to event coverage, other teams as well, but primarily work with SMU athletes.

Okay, that's lovely. And he also does a little. Can you touch a little bit about what else you do? Because primary care sports medicine isn't your full time gig, right?

No, it's not. And so I do, I tell people I do a very weird mishmash of things. I trained as an internist and after my residency and fellowship, I did a fellowship in primary care sports medicine. Maybe we can get into that and how, how I got into that. But I also run a hospitalist group. So hospitalists for your listeners are primary care physicians who work in the hospital setting but don't traditionally have an office based practice. So I started that right out of my fellowship 25 years ago and I started a group that I actually run now. And specifically the division that I'm most involved with is in the perioperative medicine space. So perioperative medicine is the care of patients before and during and after from medical perspective, folks who are having surgery. So we run the perioperative services at about half a dozen hospitals around Texas.

So he does a mishmash of things. Let's back it up. Let's back it up all the way. When was the first time that you thought, I want to be a doctor?

So probably junior high, I guess it's called middle school now. Do they have junior high anymore? No, I don't think they do. And this seed was kind of planted by my dad. Yeah, your grandfather. And I don't think the story, by the way, is going to be complete without telling your listeners that I also have a twin brother, your uncle, Uncle Pete. So Pete and I were, I think, strongly encouraged by our dad and not even stent, our mom, maybe our dad, that, hey, being a physician is something that you guys might want to consider, knowing that we maybe had some aptitudes for that, had the ability to pursue that course from an academic standpoint, took an aptitude test in middle school and basically said, hey, one of the things you might want to pursue is a career of medicine. So that was encouraging. And then, you know, as I progressed through high school, thinking about where I might want to go to college and started looking at schools that had as I started looking at schools really looking in particular schools that had a pre med program, knowing there's no pre med major per se, but knowing that schools that had a program in general that had a high acceptance rate to medical school, that also a school that I might enjoy. And I actually ended up going to SMU as an undergraduate and from that point on chose biology as a major and was on the pre med track and went from there.

Well, let's pause there for a second because when we talked to Mike Milne a couple weeks ago ago, he went to SMU kind of thinking that he was going to do some sort of pre med thing, but it's such a business school. And he said that you and Pete were really the only people that he knew that were going that path. So like what's your experience there? How would you compare that?

I think it was something that I was fairly committed to. So went into it knowing that that's what I was going to do or at least try and do when we went into college. And he is right. There is a pretty heavy emphasis on business at smu. But and this maybe is a theme kind of throughout my medical education is that you do in some sense have to take charge of what you're doing and carve your own path. And so Mike, that was an exaggeration. I think Mike did know several other of us who went into medical school. In fact, some of Mike's friends, male, female, all kind of carved that same path and, and it was small. I mean SMU is not a huge school so there wasn't a whole lot of us doing it, but there was a fair number of us and, and you know, it was our own little community there. Just I'm sure like your experience was at Clemson and Sarah's, your mom's was, my wife was at ucla. You gotta got to know the same people because you took a lot of the same classes. But I don't think the fact that SMU was business heavy really had any bearing on what, what I was going to do or was trying to do.

Okay, so then, then where'd you go to medical school?

Yeah, so like I met your mom, my wife at University of Kansas. So back then I think the process was a little bit different. Certainly was more paper based and there it was probably a less defined process but applied various places, had some interviews, some places got into some places, but KU was the easy button. Number one. It was close to home because I had grown growing up in Kansas City, a suburb of Kansas City. And.

And it was cheap.

There you go. Cost. Yeah. It was least expensive of the options that we had. And so ended up going to the University of Kansas, which was a fantastic experience, not only because of the medical experience, but we got a chance to meet your mom. And that's one of the reasons you're here.

That's right.

I used that in my KU interview. I said that k you is the reason that I exist. And it worked. Okay. But, yeah. So you're in medical school. Did you. When did you decide you kind of wanted to do the sports med route? Was this. You were thinking, okay, I want to do internal medicine, maybe I want to do a surgery path from it. Do I. Were you inclined towards orthopedics? Like, why were you like, okay, I'm going to go do internal medicine, then go on and do this sports medicine fellowship.

So that a little unusual track, I would say. And again, goes back to the SMU days and blazing your own path and kind of figuring out what you want to do. So I was interested in sports. Played sports in high school and, you know, recreational in college. And like a lot of guys who go to med school, was interested in sports. Ortho bros. Ortho bros. That's right. Turn into a med bro. Yeah. So interested in that. And as I was starting to get exposed to kind of the various pathways towards musculoskeletal medicine in particular, I realized I didn't really have the aptitude for surgery in the sense that, I don't know, I didn't think I could deal with a surgical residency. I'm not a super patient patient person. So standing on my.

He's not a patient person.

Right. Standing on my feet in the operating room for hours and hours and hours wasn't something that excited me. But I liked the clinic part. I liked the working with athletes part especially. And then during med school, I actually got hurt myself. I hurt my thumb playing basketball.

And this is the first time I've ever heard this.

They've been married for 25 years and.

Decided I needed to get checked out. And I ended up going to a clinic in the fitness center, the Kirmeyer Fitness center, which was there in KU and was. And ended up getting talked, evaluated and treated by a primary care sports medicine doctor who I really knew nothing about. And so that was a revelation and decided, well, and I discovered, hey, you can get into orthopedics without doing surgery with surgical residency. And kind of ended up talking to him and exploring various options. I ended up doing some training room visits with him at the main campus, University of Kansas. I went out to Lawrence and did some training room visits with him and said, hey, you know, maybe this is a path that I could take. I could get into sports medicine. Can you treat athletes but not do surgery? Which is something I wasn't really interested in. And really, from that point on, decided that's something I wanted to do. The question then was, what type of residency was. I was, what. What was I going to do? You can get into primary care sports medicine through a couple different pathways. Most traditionally, it's family medicine. You can also do internal medicine, which is not very traditional. Emergency medicine is one, Pediatrics is another, and then physical medicine and rehabilitation. And of those, I decided, I always joke, internal medicine was the one I disliked the least. So I decided that was the path I was going to take.

The. Just to elaborate on that, most of the sports medicine fellowships are through the family medicine programs, aren't they?

They are.

Okay, I just wanted to clarify.

Or standalone. But most of them have a strong family medicine presence or, you know, backing.

Okay, so you're there, you decide you want to do internal med. You're a year ahead of mom, and you guys decide that Florida is the best for you guys, right?

Yeah. Well, I decided it was best for me, and I made mom come along. I think satisfied a big requirement for mom that was that it wasn't cold. Why don't you tell us about your frostbite incident in May in Kansas City?

Allegedly, it wasn't frostbite. It was hypothermia. But anyway, we digress. But no, we. The program in Gainesville was good for both of us because they had a very good internal medicine program at the university hospital. And then they had a family medicine program which was at the community hospital down the street, where we got to be the only residents there. And for family medicine, it's really nice to be able to be the only residents, because it's hard if you're competing with everybody else. So for. So that particular program really had the best of both worlds, because otherwise, sometimes there's internal medicine programs that are at community hospitals, but sometimes they don't have enough breadth of experience for internal medicine medicine.

So I do kind of want to talk about this internal med thing for a second, because again, back to your carving your own path. Talk about your program and kind of the demographic of the program where a lot of these people just going on to be hospitalists were a lot of people going on to subspecialize in other specialties, and I believe from what you've talked about, there wasn't a lot of other people going and doing this sports medicine thing.

Yeah, there were none. In fact, my program director at the time was very puzzled by the fact that anyone would want to do anything like primary care sports medicine. I chose University of Florida because it was nice and warm and it was a very good program. And I liked the setting there. It was different than Kansas City. But to your question about what people were doing, the vast majority of people went into sub specializations, whether that was hematology or cardiology or nephrology. A lot of them used it as a springboard to go into the medical subject subspecialties. A few did stay and just do general internal medicine, but not many. As your point, I'm the only one who did primary care sports medicine, and I really did have to carve my own path. But it's something I knew I wanted to do. And while my program director didn't really understand it, he was very understanding of the point of the. Of the fact this is something I wanted to do and supportive of the fact that, hey, I needed to do certain rotations. So I would spend time going to high school football games, really through mom and her connections in the family medicine program. I would spend time with orthopedists rotating. I came to Dallas to do a rotation with Dr. Fowler, who was a primary care doctor for the Cowboys, who I got to get to know. And my program director let me do all of that and kind of help build my resume towards, you know, submitting that for a primary care sports medicine fellowship. In the interim, though, I'd also had an interesting site track in that after graduation, didn't go right into fellowship, actually worked as a hospitalist for a year. And that's what kind of helped build my qualifications or interest or ability to run the hospitalist group that I'm doing now.

Well, I just kind of want to chime in with these primary care sports medicine fellowships usually just take like one or two fellows each year, is that correct?

Yeah.

So at the time when you were a hospitalist, some somebody else was doing the fellowship that you ultimately ended up doing. Would you like to explain who that was?

Well, ultimately after. So after residency, I did work as a hospitalist for a year in the Gainesville area while I was applying for a fellowship and interviewed all over the country, probably interviewed six, seven fellowships and ultimately matched in the fellowship that was jointly sponsored by Methodist Hospitals of Dallas and UT Southwestern and in Dallas, Texas and Most primary care sports medicine fellow. As your mom said, fellowships are one year in length. And the person who had done the fellowship the year ahead of me was none other than my twin brother, your uncle. Uncle Pete.

I do want to pause there for a second because it is such a unique thing, which I don't think I think about that much, just because I grew up with a dad who is an identical twin. But it's just. It is so funny that you guys are identical twins. You grew up together, went to the same college, had the same major, both went to the same medical school, and now they do the same exact thing. They're literally twins. They're literally identical twins, and they live a couple streets down from each other. Like, was this always a plan or did you guys just kind of. You're twins. You think alike and you kind of. And one's doing one thing, you're like, that sounds cool. I'm going to do that too. Or you. Or did you feel like you guys, like, you were applying to medical school together, you were doing like you were being pre med together or not really?

No, I think it was the former. I mean, it wasn't intentional in any way. You know, I think we had the same friend group in college. We took all the same classes. I mean, when you have all those shared experiences, whether you're twin or not, I think that your outlook is gonna be shaped by that. And so I think very. Having very similar outlooks because of our shared, you know, our similar experiences growing up and. And doing all the same stuff really kind of helped shape our path more than, you know, discussing it together, which I don't think we. I don't really ever remember ever doing.

That sounds about right.

That sounds right. That sounds exactly right. Okay, I want to talk about, like, you did this fellowship. How did you be able to. It's kind of funny just being. Talking about your experience as your daughter is I. You. You know, growing up, you've always been the team doc for smu, and that's not really anything. And then I come to medical school, and I'm like, oh, yeah, my dad's the team doctor at smu. And people were like, that's really cool. So how did you get yourself involved in that role?

So again, has to go back to Uncle Pete. Yeah. My first role as team physician was in professional soccer. So I got to know Dr. Soriel, who was an orthopedist and only. And I don't even know how I got to know him, probably through mom and because he was in the same building?

No, I found the building through you.

It was probably through a mutual friend, actually, now that I'm thinking about, it was through a fellow by the name of John Alper who worked for the team called. It was Dallas Burn at the time, now called FC Dallas. But they're transitioning away from the physician they had. World of professional sports medicine is a little weird in that sometimes it's linked, unfortunately, to sponsorship deals, hospital system deals. At any rate, they were making a switch and they needed a new primary care physician and through some connections ended up connecting with the orthopedist who was going to be covering the team. And then he asked me to be the primary care physician. So first five years out of residency or, excuse me, at a fellowship, I worked with FC Dallas. And that was really fun. Great experience. Got to do a lot of different trips with the team, went overseas. It was a great experience. But it taught me a lot about not necessarily the medicine part, but the politics and toward the management of really the ancillaries, you know, in terms of dealing with agents and coaches and front office and all of that. That goes along with unfortunately being a team physician. And in a good way, you know, you have to be able to navigate that because it's just part of. It's part of what you do. It's not just just diagnosing and treatment with it, with treating the patients. And that's really kind of spilled over in the college ranks, you know, especially at the Division 1 level. But any rate, after that, you know, your uncle, Uncle Pete had actually right out of. Right out of fellowship too. Again, there was a change at the SMU Health Center. The physician who was there was retiring. Dr. Fowler, who was the team doc for the Cowboys, had been working with SMU and from just happenstance, decided to spend more time with the Cowboys. And Uncle Pete ended up spending more time with SMU and we cover a lot of sports besides football, so decided he needed some extra help. At the same time, I was moving on from FC Dallas, and then from that point on have worked with SMU and their athletes.

Well, we. Maybe we'll have you back to kind of discuss more of your hospitalist role and that sort of thing and kind of the business side of medicine, because I know you do a lot of that. But just real quick as we're kind of wrapping up here, what has talk about like pros and cons of working with a sports team, because we kind of talked about this with Dr. Melanie, but still lots of conversations that I have with my Friends talk about their kind of dream is to be the orthopedist for some big sports team or do something like that. Can you kind of talk about pros and cons of like working with athletes and just working with a team?

Yeah, I'd say that in my world or from my what I do in the hospital versus what I do with the athletes, it's a good change of pace because you find people who are super motivated to get well, they're very healthy. It's a fun group because for the most part you can you give them some guidance and they will generally do that. I think being with being part of the team is also very fun and I think that's what appeals. It certainly has appealed to me forever being part of the team, not as a player or a coach, but part of the team atmosphere. And I think that would draw a lot of people into sports medicine, especially team coverage. And certainly that's the case for me. And you certainly get a sense of that working with the athletes. The relationships that you build with the athletes is also just like any patient and especially in the college level where you can see an athlete when they're a freshman and then watch them mature probably much like a teacher or anybody else involved in education or that setting and to the point where they get to be a senior and then move on, graduate. Although that dynamics change a little BIT in Division 1 world with transfer port and all that. But that certainly is one of the very gratifying things of being part of the sports medicine at that level. And again, we're talking about a level that's pretty high. It's effectively professional. You know, there's, there's. Most sports medicine physicians do not work at that level. Most sports medicine physicians work at the level of high school, junior high, whatever. There's far more, and we tell this people all the time, way more of those positions that are available than are at the college D1 college or professional level. But any rate, the downsides, you know, to that are, you know, certainly there are and this is one of the things I learned way back working with FC Dallas. There are certain pressures in terms of that coaches feel making sure their best players are playing all the time, or at least they feel that way. And sometimes there's an imbalance can be looking out for the athlete's well being versus making sure that athlete participates sometimes. And certainly money is a motivating factor at that level that can get in the way of patient's care. I'd say, you know, there's not a Lot of glamour and travel. With sports medicine, people like to think it's glamorous, and it's not. You get to see a lot. You get to see a lot of planes and buses and inside of hotel rooms and the inner workings of stadiums, which aren't super glamorous. A lot of concrete and plastic chairs, and so that's. And many times very cramped quarters. So I would say that's less glamorous than people think it is. Being on the sidelines certainly can be energetic when you've got 100,000 people around you, but there's also pressure involved there, too, and making decisions, you know, in front of that type of audience, I think it's not for everybody. So you have to have the right mindset to be able to do that. But all in all, it's been a fantastic ride. Really, really fun.

Okay, well, we don't have that much time left, but just. Do you have any advice?

I'd say, to your point, for people who want to get, you know, have the dream of being the team physician for. For a big professional team or college team, I'd say focus on the smaller pieces first. In other words, hey, if you want to be a team physician, get involved in that. Get involved at the local level, your high school, your local college. Those are the places where I think you can really make the most difference and probably, in fact, probably even have the most fun. And I would also say the sports medicine, if you're really, really committed to that, that the sports medicine community isn't all that big. So if you're involved at that level, you're going to make the types of connections that you might want to make. That and the opportunities will open themselves up to be able to work at a higher level. But focusing on starting small, I think is a good place to start.

Nice.

Well, thank you. This was a lot better. So much better. So much better.

Right now. You've got most improved podcast guests.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Do you have anything to plug?

I do not.

And you guys know where to find us at Generations MD on Tik Tok and Instagram. And if you have any questions or interested in being a guest on the podcast, you can email us ataskgenerations mdmail.com and we will talk to you next week. Bye, guys.

Bye.