Today's News

Thursday, February 14, 2002

Golfing Skills Win Annual Meeting Trip for Swedish Resident

It didn't seem likely that someone's golf winnings could earn a trip to attend this year's AAOS Annual Meeting. But with beginner's luck, three birdies and "the flow" going for him, Hans Laestander, MD, a fourth-year resident at Sahlgren University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, literately "played his way" to the Dallas Convention Center.

Dr. Laestande's entry in the Nordic Orthopaedic Federation Golf Competition, sponsored by Depuy, a Johnson & Johnson company, paid off handsomely. The first day of last summer's competition was held in Ängelhom, Sweden, and the second day in Örkelijunga, Sweden.

His competition: orthopaedic residents from Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

"After the first day, I was in third place with 35 points," he recalls. "The second day, I played the golf game of my life. For instance, I scored three birdies. I had up until that day scored one birdie in my career! But what won me the trip? I entered what professional golfers call, 'the flow,' a feeling of total concentration and being unable to do anything wrong."

It's no surprise then that Dr. Laestander is thrilled about being at this year's AAOS Annual Meeting.

"Sweden is a small country - with a total of 9 million inhabitants," explains Dr. Laestander. "It is almost an absolute necessity to go abroad to the big conferences to see, hear and learn. And the AAOS Annual Meeting is the biggest of them all. It is also recommended here that you go sometime [to the Annual Meeting] during your residency. But then the clinic has to pay your trip and that doesn't always happen for financial reasons. I will get to see and hear and even talk to the people who have written all the books and articles I have studied during my training - with some degree of ardor."

According to Dr. Laestander, most practicing orthopaedists in Sweden have attended the AAOS Annual Meeting at least once. "And if they are active researchers they have already been there several times," he says. "Among the residents…. If one gets to go [to the AAOS Annual Meeting] we're happy for him."

What interests Dr. Laestander the most about the AAOS Annual Meeting?

Just about everything, he notes. "I'm interested in adult reconstruction in hip/knee; basic research; foot and ankle; hand and wrist; international symposia, nonclinical/practice management; pediatrics; rehabilitation medicine; shoulder and elbow; spine; sports medicine/arthroscopy; trauma; tumor/metabolic disease," he says. "There is a great deal to learn in seeing that you can, in fact, treat the same medical condition in several different ways in different countries. It is very easy to grow 'home-blind' if you only learn to do something in the way it is done at your home clinic."