(bright music)
- I'm Doctor Steve Brigido.
I'm a foot and ankle surgeon at Coordinated Health
and I see patients at the East Stroudsburg campus,
the Allentown campus, the Bethlehem campus,
the Easton campus, and the Brodheadsville campus.
You know, certainly the most common conditions that we see
are certainly conditions of the great toe,
whether it's a bunion deformity
or whether it's an arthritic great toe,
are certainly something that affects a significant portion
of the population.
As we get older and maintain our activity levels
as we get older,
that arthritic condition of the big toe
is something that is certainly very common.
And then the other things that we see are,
again, the arthritic ankle,
which is certainly a research interest of mine
and a personal interest of mine,
as well as the cartilage injuries.
In terms of the arthritic ankle,
we're doing everything from arthroscopy to
ankle replacements and ankle fusions.
I had a injury when I was a child,
actually when I was in high school
that kind of spurred the interest in foot and ankle.
I had a Lisfranc fracture dislocation
when I was in high school,
and that kind of interrupted a portion
of my basketball season.
I went on to play football in college,
and being involved in the training room
and understanding what athletes go through
to get back on the field was certainly
a big factor in why I wanted to go
into foot and ankle reconstruction.
Because of that, it's led to my opportunity
to treat athletes at Lehigh University,
and we're a pretty integral part
of their athletics' sports medicine program,
and it's been exciting and it's something that certainly
is a nice aspect of our practice and helps
make me feel young at times
when you get to deal with athletes on a routine basis.
I went to undergraduate and got my Bachelor's of Science
at a small college in Richmond, Virginia
called Randolph-Macon College.
There I played football for four years
and was a pre-med major.
I went to medical school at Temple University
and did my surgical training at St. Agnes Medical Center,
where we trained on everything from foot and ankle
including ankle replacement to ankle deformity,
foot and ankle problems and sports medicine.
When I started with the foot and ankle team
here at Coordinated Health in 2004, early 2005,
there were only four of us.
And now we've grown to eight strong.
We have a physical therapy division that is focused
on treating foot and ankle pathology
and understanding the biomechanics
and the problems that arise with foot and ankle surgery
as well as foot and ankle injuries.
We now have radiologists that have a great understanding
of the foot and ankle anatomy
as well as foot and ankle injuries,
and now we have a team that has a complete understanding
of everything from A to Z that needs to be done
to make sure that the patient experience is better.
I got involved in research when I was in medical school.
I worked in the gait laboratory which,
that was a place where we could take a patient
who had either a deformity or a birth defect
or some sort of orthopedic problem
and watch the way that they walked or ran
preoperatively and then assess them
postoperatively and understand
how their biomechanics changed
and how we were better able to understand
how to solve their problems.
With that being said,
I won an award when I was in medical school
to go present my research
at the International Society of Mechanics in Switzerland,
back in 2001, and at that point
that was kind of when I decided that
research was something that I wanted
to have part of my practice on a routine basis.
Right now, we currently have 13 different projects going on.
We publish typically about 10 papers a year
on foot and ankle research.
We're doing a significant amount of research
on ankle replacement surgery as well as cartilage injuries
and we're working with some different techniques
to help try and regenerate cartilage
utilizing different growth factors
and different biologic scaffolds
that can help take a patient who's got the potential
to form a significant arthritis down the road
and try to prevent that,
and allow them to get back to their athletic activities.
My team has been able to help develop
two other projects that we've been working on
outside of the medical practice.
The first is a surgical bioskills laboratory,
which is a place where surgeons can come
and learn how to do new techniques in surgery,
and it's not focused just on foot and ankle
or orthopedics, it's head-to-toe medical and surgical
reconstruction.
It's a facility called the Venel Institute.
The second is a company that I own,
I'm the chief medical officer and chairman of the board
of a company called Icon Orthopedics,
which is a hardware company
which is involved in the development
of different types of patents
and IPOs where we can take ideas that we learn
from problems that stem in the OR,
and try to make solutions to some of the things
that make our lives difficult in terms of treating patients.
In terms of outside interests,
I think certainly my corporate hobbies
are certainly something that takes up a lot of my time.
I'll typically do anywhere from 100 to 120 trips a year
whether it be on the west coast or Midwest or even overseas,
so I do spend a lot of time on a personal level traveling.
That tends to take up a lot of my weekends.
But when I am home I do like to spend time
with my family, and I also play golf.
The typical patient can do several things
to make sure that they maintain a healthy lifestyle
and the ability to do the activities they want to perform.
The first is just quite simply understanding
the differences between shoe gear.
With the wonderful advancements in technology we have,
shoe companies have unfortunately made it more difficult
for the patient to understand what he or she
should be wearing,
and I think first is understanding
what type of foot you have,
how your foot works
and then matching the appropriate athletic shoe to that.
Today we've got shoes that can help prevent patients
from supinating, help patients from pronating,
we've got shoes that are more flexible
and less flexible,
we've got shoes that simulate the barefoot experience,
and all of those shoes can be beneficial for a person,
but not all of those shoes are beneficial for everybody.
And that's the main thing.
And the second thing is just getting an understanding,
especially for the diabetic patient,
of just inspecting your feet on a daily basis.
An activity such as that which maybe takes
30 seconds of your morning can really prevent you
from having a problem such as an amputation
or an infection occur.
I think the exciting thing
about the foot and ankle team here at Coordinated Health
is that we have something for everybody.
We have an experience where a patient could come in
with an adult complex deformity
that needs to be reconstructed
and we have a solution for your problem,
or if you're just here for an understanding
of your shoe gear,
if you want to get an understanding
of maybe an orthotic device that fits
inside of your shoe,
if you're here for diabetic foot care,
we have something for everybody.
There's not a problem that can occur
in the foot and ankle,
whether it's with a pediatric patient or adult patient,
or a patient that perhaps has an illness
that needs special attention that we can't take care of,
and we have a physician that has an expertise
in one of those areas at all times
that's here to serve those patients' needs.
You're not going to find that in this region.
So when you think about the fact
that the foot and ankle division has doubled
over the last several years,
and you think about how our physical therapy
and our radiology team have grown,
when you think about our outstanding inpatient
and outpatient surgical facilities,
the Coordinated Health foot and ankle team
is truly the best patient experience,
hands-down, in the region.
(bright music)