Ideas in the Wild: How Dr Kevin R Stone is Helping Athletes Play Longer
With each setback that may come your way, take it by the horns and use it to become better, smarter, and fitter than ever before. There’s an expression in pseudo-Latin that we used to use that is “Illegitimi non carborundum.” It means “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” I look at injuries that way, as well: don’t let them get you down. Injuries are opportunities.
Why are some octogenarians competitive athletes while others struggle to walk up the stairs? It isn’t luck. It’s orthopedic science. All great athletes get injured. Only the best of them use those injuries to come back to their sport better — fitter, faster, and stronger than before.
In Play Forever, Dr. Kevin R. Stone shares his revolutionary approach to sports medicine. Readers will discover how injuries can lead to a lifetime of high-performance fitness and athleticism. Backed by scientific outcome studies on orthopedic treatments and implants, Play Forever is a go-to health and fitness source, helping athletes play the sport they love to age 100 and beyond. I caught up with Dr. Stone to learn more about his book: what inspired him to write it, what lessons has he learned, and how is he applying those lessons in his own life?
What happened that made you decide to author the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
I spent my last 30 years as an orthopedic surgeon coaching patients one-on-one on dealing with their specific injuries, their fears, and their recovery time. It’s not just about their injury and the surgery, but also about life, sport, and happiness. It’s about how to get the most out of their procedure, how to recover from it, and how to come back better than they’ve ever been.
I realized while coaching one-on-one that I could do better if I could expand the reach of my coaching, my comments, and my thoughts. So in 2014, I started writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner, which became a blog, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
I ended with the Examiner in 2020 but I continue to write each week. Along the way, I realized that I needed to coalesce these writings into a more coherent story for patients and for athletes in general. So I started writing the first version of this book about five years ago, and through a continuous process of optimization in the years since, it became Play Forever.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned going through the journey you share in the book?
The biggest lesson is that you can take an injury and turn it into an opportunity. That with the right attitude, coaching, guidance, and surgery, you can take what used to be thought of as end-stage knee, shoulder, or ankle and rebuild it both biologically or bionically. You can rebuild yourself and come back, as we say, fitter, faster, and stronger than you’ve been in years.
Don’t accept an injury as a deficit. I think I’ve learned that lesson from all my patients who cheat, which means they didn’t follow our advice! They went harder and faster than we ever thought was possible, and they taught us that so many of the things that we held them back on could actually be done earlier if the surgery was done well and the tissues were healing well.
I learned from them what’s possible. I learned that we often restrain people too much and that if we can inspire them and give them the right kinds of guidance, they can go harder than we ever thought. I also learned the biology of healing is variable from one patient to another and that if we can accelerate that healing by adding growth factors, stem cell-derived self-repair cells, and lubrication, we can stimulate tissues to heal faster than we ever thought was possible.
My patients would ask me, “Hey, doc, why’s it take a year to come back from an ACL injury?” I realized that there are things we could do to help them come back faster than ever before.
How will you apply this lesson in your life moving forward?
I take the lesson from my patients that when you go into surgery or into some major event with a smile on your face, the whole team smiles and everybody around you relaxes and does their best job. On the flip side, when you go into surgery or any other major event with a lot of fear and anxiety, or with a sad face or an angry one, the outcome is less predictable.
With each setback that may come your way, take it by the horns and use it to become better, smarter, and fitter than ever before. There’s an expression in pseudo-Latin that we used to use that is “Illegitimi non carborundum.” It means “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” I look at injuries that way, as well: don’t let them get you down. Injuries are opportunities.
Here’s another way I apply what I’ve learned from my patients: almost everything we touch could be made better. The surgical tools I use or the procedures we’re doing — I want to figure out how to make everything better. There’s no such thing as a standard of care. Everything can be improved, whether we’re improving the science of it, the techniques, or the biology.
I don’t believe a physician or a surgeon should do anything to — or put anything in — a patient that they either don’t know the outcome of or they aren’t trying to study it. Going forward, a big part of the practice and research foundation that I have now is taking each thing that we do and thinking about how to do it better every single time, every single day. That drive to improve, to push forward the edge of science, and to contribute to the world is part of the fun.
Thank you so much for these insights. This was very inspirational!
