Anaheim to Be Site of Sports Medicine Office

With the Mighty Ducks hockey team enhancing Anaheim’s position as a professional sports center, one of the nation’s premier sports medicine facilities has decided to open a clinic in the city.

The Kerlan-Jobe Orthopedics Clinic, which counts the Los Angeles Rams, California Angels, Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Kings among its clients, will open an office near the Anaheim Arena by the end of the year, a spokesman for the clinic said last week.

“It seemed to make sense to move into Orange County,” said Paul King, executive director of the clinic. “It’s where the action is.”

He said the clinic is coming to Anaheim to be near its patients from the Rams, Angels, Anaheim Bullfrogs roller hockey team and the legions of weekend warriors in the county who break bones, tear ligaments and strain muscles. The Ducks and the clinic are negotiating a contract for the clinic’s services as team physicians.

City officials say the addition of the clinic to the city is a sign of the economic and social benefits that the new arena will generate.

“I think you’ll start seeing a lot of other spinoffs in terms of job creation and additional services for Orange County residents,” Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly said. “I’m sure there will be other sports-related enterprises going up in the area.”

The clinic’s founders--Robert Kerlan and Frank Jobe--are credited with many breakthroughs in sports medicine and have prolonged the careers of hundreds of professional athletes.

Jobe became the first orthopedist to perform reconstructive surgery on an elbow and shoulder. Those innovative surgeries are now known simply as “The Tommy John Procedure” and the “Orel Hershiser Procedure” after the pitchers whose careers were extended by those operations.

Although Kerlan, at 71, hasn’t performed surgery in about 25 years, he is regarded as “the Father of Sports Medicine” because of he is “always on the cutting edge of what’s going on,” King said.

Athletes from around the world have come to be worked on at the Kerlan-Jobe practice in Inglewood, near the Great Western Forum. The doctors have treated the knees of Earvin (Magic) Johnson and Troy Aikman, the backs of Darryl Strawberry and Wayne Gretzky and the arm of Sandy Koufax.

In fact, Dr. Lewis Yocum, who recently operated on Angels third baseman Kelly Gruber’s shoulder, is one of the doctors who will be starting the Anaheim practice. But what Kerlan-Jobe doctors do for professional athletes, they also do for the public.

“The weekend warrior wants to get back out there doing what he was doing just as much as the pros,” King said.

For years, the Rams and the Angels have asked that Kerlan-Jobe open a clinic in the area. But it wasn’t until the arena opened and the Mighty Ducks hockey franchise was committed to playing there that administrators moved forward on the idea.

The clinic currently has a temporary facility at Anaheim Memorial Hospital. Even when the clinic settles into a yet-undetermined facility near the arena, an affiliation with the hospital will continue. Clinic doctors will use the hospital to perform most of their surgeries.

As word leaked that Kerlan-Jobe was opening a clinic and forming an affiliation with Anaheim Memorial, local hospitals administrators contacted the clinic to offer their facilities, King said.

But Anaheim Memorial was selected because of its interest in sports medicine and its closeness to the sports franchises, he added.

Like the clinic, Anaheim Memorial Hospital is seizing on the growth of professional sports in Anaheim, securing an exclusive contract to provide medical services to the Anaheim Arena.

“We identified a need in sports medicine in the area,” said Chris Van Gorder, a senior vice president at Anaheim Memorial Hospital. The demand comes not only from professional athletes, he said, but also the increasing numbers of people who jog, bike and pursue other sports to keep in shape and have fun.

He said the hospital has aggressively built a sports medicine program over the past couple of years, devoting an entire floor of a new hospital wing to the program, as well as providing medical trainers to high school sports teams in Anaheim.

“Adding Kerlan-Jobe gives us a preeminence that nobody else can touch,” Van Gorder said. “We’re really pleased.”

King said physicians from the Inglewood office will rotate through the Anaheim facility. About four full-time physicians will be on staff in Anaheim with about half a dozen physical therapists.