Episode 174: Dr. Sean Kerger, D.O.- Sports Medicine- It's Game Time!

My name is Suzanne Chaar, and I'm a third year medical student at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.

And I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Sean Kerger.

Dr. Kerger, welcome to the DO or Do Not podcast.

How are you doing today?

I'm well.

Thanks for having me on here, Suzanne.

Absolutely.

I'm really excited to kind of dive deep into all the things that you do at the school and outside of the school.

Can you tell us a little bit what sport medicine physician does and what type of patient do you usually see?

Sports medicine is a really broad field, especially these days.

When I started about 30 years ago, it was much more narrow and just taking care of athletic teams, usually at a college or high school level or professional.

And now it's really branched out as has sports in general.

to a much broader and larger audience.

And the sports medicine is sort of followed that way.

So sports medicine really refers to the medical practice of taking care of athletes.

And the definition of athlete has changed over a large amount of time.

I've seen 80 and 90-year-old marathoners and master competitors in all kinds of levels of sports.

And that also applies to guys more like me, who are the weekend warriors, just trying to grind it out for another year in their favorite activity.

So It does apply to a broad spectrum of patient populations.

And I've also even seen it applied to the industrial athlete, referring to people who use their bodies professionally for work, things that are not considered necessarily sports.

So really, it's a broad panel.

And with that comes a broad panel of patients.

And that's half of what makes it interesting.

In addition, all of the athletic coverages that most people associate it with.

I have heard that this specialty also called non-surgical orthopedic.