Fixing Hips and Playing Football w/ Dr. Guillaume Dumont

Episode Information

September 30, 2021

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Guillaume Dumont talks about his youth in Montreal, his experience as a football player in the States, new developments in orthopedic surgery and healthcare in general, his personal philosophy as a doctor, and more.

Topics Include:

• His childhood in Canada and his transition to the US
• His football career in America and his switch to sports medicine
• Learning about shoulder surgery in France
• His fellowship experience at Harvard
• Arthroscopic surgeries and the benefits of the procedure
• New game-changers in orthopedics and other advancements in medicine
• His personal approach to the doctor-patient relationship
• His goals for creating content on Doctorpedia
• His passion for treating hip labral tears
• What he does to stay healthy

Highlights

• “I stayed healthy throughout the many years of playing football. But I do think that seeing the good that came from the athletic trainers and the medical staff around the teams, especially going into the collegiate level and the immense production that there is around sports, was very exciting to me.”
• “I didn’t have a particular event that [caused me to go into medicine]. [But] I felt like I could help people and help society, and medicine was at the forefront.”
• “Fellowship is incredible. It’s a very fun year, no matter where you do it. One of the perks of doing it through the Harvard system at Massachusetts General Hospital was that they cover the various sports teams that are in Boston. And as you know, the sports teams in Boston in the last decade have had a lot of success. So we covered the New England Patriots, we covered the Boston Bruins and the Boston Red Sox.”
• “I think the root of good healthcare is that it all starts with questions and bringing the right questions to the table. And so usually if anyone claims to know all the answers, as a patient, I would tend to run the other way. As a doctor, I think that’s the advice I can give patients. That if someone seems overconfident on something, sometimes it’s good to question it a little bit.”
• “Where I think [Doctorpedia] can make a difference, is having somewhere where people can go, where they can rely on the information. If the information is provided by people who are board certified, they’re vetted, we can trust who they are. We can trust their background and their training. And if someone knows that they have a place like that that they can go and get information that’s easy to understand, not overly confusing with a bunch of different, complicated medical words, that’s somewhere where you can trust.”
• “For me, when I treat a patient, I always tell them that I can’t promise them their outcome. But I can promise them that I’m going to do my best to help them. And from there, I can start building more of a trust relationship with them. That I’m in it with them. I’m supportive of their needs…. Tell them you’re going to fight for them, you’re going to do what you can, whether that’s structurally, whether that’s helping them navigate the system, whether that’s helping them find the right resources to rehab. And then I think that you have someone that’s on your team.”

Episode Transcript

Daniel Lobell: (00:00)
This podcast or any written material derived from its transcripts represents the opinions of the medical professional being interviewed. The content here is for informational purposes only, and should not be taken as medical advice since every person is unique. Please consult your healthcare professional for any personal or specific needs.

Daniel Lobell: (00:18)
Hello and welcome to the Doctorpedia podcast. I’m your host, Daniel Lobell, and I’m honored to be on the line today with Dr. Guillaume Dumont. How are you Dr. Dumont?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (00:35)
Daniel, I’m doing well. Thanks for asking. Thanks for having me on the show.

Daniel Lobell: (00:39)
My pleasure. And before we get into anything, I have to ask you about your name. It’s so unique. I asked you how to pronounce it before we started, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to read the spelling to the listeners and see if they would have guessed. It’s G U I L A U M E. Is it French?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (01:00)
It is. French origins, French Canadian. And actually, you missed an L, that’s right.

Daniel Lobell: (01:05)
Yes.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (01:06)
But yeah, Guillaume, and I always tell people, it’s most easily pronounced “ge” and then “home” without the H. And then the sort of Anglophone pronunciation of my last name is Dumont, but really pronounced “Dumo” in French.

Daniel Lobell: (01:23)
Well, I know Cafe Dumont in New Orleans where you get the really good bunets. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there —

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (01:29)
Very similar. I have! Very similar.

Daniel Lobell: (01:31)
And then I know about guillotines. So I put those two together [Guillaume laughs] and made a guess that it was French. And I know that you also…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (01:37)
Very dissimilar from the guillotine. So I do not do those things.

Daniel Lobell: (01:41)
[Daniel laughs] Never? But you’re a surgeon! [Daniel laughs] You don’t have like a main one?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (01:49)
Yeah. A little bit different.

Daniel Lobell: (01:51)
So I also had a little background information that you had done surgeries and studied, or, was a doctor in the French Alps. I want to talk about that as well. So that was another good hint, but let’s start at the beginning. You said it’s a French Canadian name. Were you raised in Canada, or… Tell us your background. Tell us a little history.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (02:15)
I was. So I grew up just outside of Montreal in Canada. Both my parents were French Canadian, went to English schools, starting in pre-kindergarten all the way through. And so that made the transition to the United States a little bit easier later on in life. Although in Canada, of course, French and English are both utilized and spoken. But I grew up in Canada, played some football growing up and then eventually went to college in the United States at the University of Tennessee on a football scholarship. And so that’s what brought me to the United States initially. And there, after spending four years there, learning and playing some football, I decided to go into medical school. And here we are.

Daniel Lobell: (03:02)
So was it the inspiration? Did you get injured? And you’re like, “Oh man, this sucks. Let me try and help myself and other athletes and become an orthopedic surgeon,” or, what happened there? Sounds like it’s a connection.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (03:17)
There is a connection. And a lot of folks who end up going into orthopedics seem to have that story. Fortunately, I did not have an injury. I stayed healthy throughout the many years of playing football. But I do think that seeing the good that came from the athletic trainers and the medical staff around the teams, especially going into the collegiate level and the immense production that there is around sports, was very exciting to me. I don’t know that that’s what led directly to going into field medicine, but I enjoyed watching them. I enjoyed seeing them help folks around me. And so certainly as my career progressed from orthopedics to then more specifically into orthopedic sports medicine, I think that that’s a link that has been enjoyable and certainly gives me something to relate to with the athletes that we treat.

Daniel Lobell: (04:09)
Sure. Yeah. I’m sure that it’s definitely a good talking point to be able to say that you played college football. Is football even popular in Canada?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (04:19)
Well, it’s a lot more popular now than what it was years ago. So when I started playing football, I was nine years old and we barely could put a team together back then for the nine year old age group, it was nine on nine football. And I can remember even a game where we didn’t have enough players to field the team. So the other team actually lent us one of their players. [Daniel chuckles] So I always look back at that and I was like, wow, I don’t know how I would’ve felt if I would have been the other player that got shipped over to the other team.

Daniel Lobell: (04:45)
Right. [Both chuckle] It’s one thing to be picked last. It’s another thing to be handed over as a sacrifice to the other team.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (04:54)
That’s right. That’s right. But no, football has actually gained a lot of popularity in Canada over the last two decades. And there’s a few differences. The field, if you play with the Canadian rules, the field is actually wider in Canada and the end zones instead of being 10 yards deep are actually 20 yards deep. And there’s actually a… The 50 yard line is not the middle of the field. There’s actually a 55 yard line which is called the center and then two 50 yard lines. So that part of it can get a little bit confusing to the American watchers…

Daniel Lobell: (05:29)
They had to make it different.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (05:29)
They had to make it different. You gotta be unique. [Daniel chuckles]

Daniel Lobell: (05:31)
Especially in French Canada, where it’s even more European. I remember when I was in Montreal once years ago for the Just for Laughs festival, I was there covering it from — I used to have a comedy magazine and it really is like, yes, you’re in another country, but it’s not like being in an English speaking country. I mean, it really is almost like being in France and a lot of this, I don’t know if it’s still this way, but I remember a lot of the traffic signs were in French with no English translation. This is before Waze and we’re driving around and we were lost. And — oh, I remember a funny anecdote I’ll share with you. I remember we pulled up next to this old French Canadian dude, and we’re looking to get back into town cause we’d wandered out on a little sight seeing. And I said, “So where do I go?” He goes, “You make a left and then a right. And then is direct. And then you’re going to go around the loop and you come to the [unintelligible] bridge. I’m like. “The what bridge?” “The [unintelligible] bridge.” I’m like, “The what bridge? He goes, “[unintelligible] bridge!” I said, all right, thank you. [Daniel laughs]

Daniel Lobell: (06:43)
I came back. I was like, I think we’re just as good using the street signs.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (06:47)
Well, I’m glad you made it wherever you were heading. But that brings up interesting points. So yeah, Montreal and Quebec city, obviously both big cities in the province of Quebec, a lot of French heritage, really a good, strong, unique culture. And that was a great place to grow up. I really enjoyed it. And then for you obviously, to be involved and participating in the Just for Laughs festival, it’s a wonderful city in the summertime. Montreal has got so many festivals. The jazz festival, the Just for Laughs festival, the Formula One race, all those are around the same time of year. But I think for you to be a part of that, that’s fantastic.

Daniel Lobell: (07:26)
Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was one of my first tastes of like the big comedy world. I was just so new to it all and it was very exciting. I had no idea what to expect, but for people listening who don’t know, Just for Laughs is like the Mecca of comedy festivals, really. Everybody, it’s funny because all of Hollywood goes to Canada, to Quebec. You wouldn’t think it, but you think it might be the other way around, but yeah.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (07:54)
We’re pretty funny people.

Daniel Lobell: (07:56)
Yeah, that’s true. We just lost a great Canadian comedian today. Norm McDonald passed away, which is very sad.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (08:03)
Yeah, I heard about that. Very sad.

Daniel Lobell: (08:05)
One of my favorite comedians. But a lot of the great comedians come from Canada.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (08:10)
Absolutely.

Daniel Lobell: (08:13)
I’ll tell you my theory on that. I know this is a sidetrack, but just because it came up, I think there’s an outsider mentality to Canada. Now I don’t know if that’s just because I’m biased because I’m from America looking at them as outsiders. But I do feel like there’s like — and you can tell me if I’m off base or not, but I think there’s almost a little bit of like you’re not in the cool club, which is America, if you’re in Canada. There’s a little bit of an outsider feeling. Am I wrong? I mean…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (08:46)
I think that certainly in some industries, we know that the United States has done extremely well and you’re going to be at the top of the game. And sometimes it takes being competitive with the United States and sometimes even coming to the United States. And I think that Canada and Quebec, specifically as a province, has so much to offer. For most folks who live there, I think that they’re very proud and very satisfied with it. And certainly for me, the move was less about kind of going somewhere bigger and better, but just coming to somewhere that had sort of what I wanted to experience, which was at that point, high-level college football. And then ultimately what sort of led me to stay, was you meet people. I met my wife while I was in the United States and then we built a family here. And so here we are.

Daniel Lobell: (09:45)
So I am an elitist American. [Daniel laughs]

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (09:48)
I think that’s what you’re saying. I was just being nice about it, but I think that’s what you pinned yourself as.

Daniel Lobell: (09:58)
Cool. Well, let’s go back to your story because it’s really cool. You’ve gotten to do some incredible things. I was reading your bio and I want to kind of take the listeners on this journey. So you come out to play football and somewhere in this, you wind up going into medicine. You mentioned that, but what was the impetus? What led you to say, “You know what, I’m not going to pursue being an athlete. I’m going to pursue helping other people pursue being an athlete.”

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (10:27)
Well I think that oftentimes — first of all, I am part of a residency program in my current job where I have the pleasure of being able to evaluate people who are going into residency after medical school to go into an orthopedic specialty. And so we do get to read a lot of the, they call them personal statements, which basically is a letter kind of telling the program why you want to do this, why you want to be an orthopedic surgeon. So looking back, for me, I didn’t have a particular event that happened. Wasn’t like I had that injury that you mentioned and I said, “Hey, now I want to do this because I want to treat injuries like what I had.” I didn’t have that. Basically what I had was, I had good grades and I knew that academically, I could hold my own and wanted to do something special, something that could have an impact.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (11:16)
And when you look at those different careers, that in my opinion, back then, and still now I felt like I could help people and help society, and medicine was at the forefront. And so that’s what led me to it. And if I had to think back and say, well, in terms of impetus, what really was or were the main things that led you to it, that enabled it for you, for me, it was my parents. And my parents were not physicians. No one in my family had ever been a doctor. But it was sort of their drive to push me to trials, to different things, to really experience a variety of different sports and activities growing up and at the center of that, really, and this was my mother, but just making sure that no matter how busy the weeks got with football, with skating, with soccer, with… I even did some fencing for a while.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (12:08)
I mean, stuff that was sort of off the beaten path, playing piano, at the center of all that was school, right. And she said, no matter what you do, you have to do well in school and really never let up on that. And so, honestly, I think even today, I mean, a lot of that drive has come from what she instilled in me. So even though it wasn’t like an “aha” moment that sort of led to the medicine, I think that it was definitely that motivation from my parents and it was the hard work and work ethic that my father had his entire life, working night shifts, evening shifts, kind of showing me what it took to succeed. I think those were the things that led me to healthcare.

Daniel Lobell: (12:51)
What did your parents do for work?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (12:54)
Yeah, so my father is an industrial mechanic and he’s worked at several places, working on big machinery for various companies. And then my mother works at a community college where she’s an administrator there. As I was growing up, my mother actually stopped working and took care of my brother and I at home. And then since we’ve gone back and left the house and went to school, she went back to work, actually she went back to school herself. And so you could see that drive to be successful in school wasn’t just something that she was forcing upon us. She even in herself, went back later in life. So she had it in her and I’m proud of her for doing that as well.

Daniel Lobell: (13:34)
Yeah. And if you get something from each of your parents, you get the surgery from your dad and the people skills from your mom, then you’re in good shape. Because I mean, you put those two skillsets together. That’s a great surgeon and doctor, I would imagine.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (13:48)
Well, I hope so. And you take whatever you can, I think from the people around you. Not to make it sound like you’re taking things from people, but I think that you learn from people around you —

Daniel Lobell: (13:58)
I was starting to think you were a pickpocket.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (13:58)
Sometimes it’s a… [Guillaume laughs] Yeah, exactly. I had to watch myself there. No, I think that sometimes it’s your parents and for me, they were a huge influence, but sometimes in people who may not have the benefit of having the greatest family, the greatest sort of upbringing, or maybe even having parents that they know, there are always, I think, people in your life that have a big impact. And I think that figuring that out and identifying who those people are and really sort of accepting that nurturing, I think is a really important part of growing up.

Daniel Lobell: (14:35)
Yeah. You know, it reminds me of my friend, the late comedian Ralphie May used to always say that you’re a combination of the five people closest to you.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (14:43)
Hm, interesting.

Daniel Lobell: (14:43)
So if you want to improve, look at the five people and maybe you need to swap one out. [Both chuckle]

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (14:52)
Sure. Yeah.

Daniel Lobell: (14:54)
He always said surround yourself with people that you want to be like and make sure that your core five people are all people that you want to aspire something towards with some part of who they are.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (15:06)
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot to that. And then of course those people change over the course of your lifetime and it doesn’t mean that those people are no longer as important or as valuable, but you bring on new people for different parts of the journey. And at this point, my wife, Ashley, and of course our four children are those core people. And now they’re the inspiration behind everything and sort of the drive to get up really early in the morning and go help people and then be able to come back home in the evening and play and do fun things. So.

Daniel Lobell: (15:40)
Cool. And you went to University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee for your undergrad, right?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (15:46)
Correct.

Daniel Lobell: (15:47)
So is that where you were playing football?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (15:50)
I was. Now don’t be fooled, I was certainly no superstar. I went to school there to play football and certainly did my best, but if you look up the same timeframe that I was in school, there were certainly some greats. And you did not see me on ESPN at the same time as you did certainly the names like Peyton Manning, Jason Witten, John Henderson.

Daniel Lobell: (16:18)
Did you know these guys?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (16:18)
Yeah. So Peyton Manning, I did not know, he played a few years before I was there. Jason Witten was a good friend, is a good friend. And obviously played, had a tremendous career in Dallas for the Cowboys. And then there were numerous others that were on the team over the course of four years and had great careers in the NFL.

Daniel Lobell: (16:42)
Well, and you’ve had a great career in orthopedics and I would say it’s on par. You’re on the NFL level of orthopedics. [Guillaume laughs] I was just looking over your…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (16:54)
Well… very different.

Daniel Lobell: (16:55)
So you go from there to —

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (16:58)
A little less glamour.

Daniel Lobell: (16:58)
Well I don’t know, let’s get into it, because it looks pretty glamorous to me. You go to Emory University of Medicine in Atlanta from there, and then you wind up studying orthopedic surgery in Texas at Southwestern Medical Center in the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. And you do a fellowship at Harvard. You go to the Alps Surgery Institute in, is it Annecy? I don’t know. I don’t want to pronounce it wrong.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (17:27)
Well, you’re pronouncing it the way it’s spelled, which is what I did when I first went there, but it’s actually called Annecy. So like the name Anne and then just C. That’s the way they say it.

Daniel Lobell: (17:36)
In France? I want to hear a little bit about some of these experiences. Harvard, the Alps Surgery Institute in France. It sounds like something out of a storybook.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (17:47)
[Guillaume chuckles] It actually, if you Google images of that city, Annecy in France, it actually looks like a storybook. It’s incredible. But rewinding back a little bit before that experience, it really was Dallas. And so Dallas, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center where I did my residency, I picked — and I’m sure, as you’ve spoken to multiple physicians, you can understand the process for picking a residency, it’s a little bit like a lottery, right? You make a list of where you want to go and you interview and they make a list of who they want. And then the computer system matches it up. And so one of my top choices was Dallas. And so I ended up going to Dallas and one of the reasons why I really wanted to go there was for orthopedics. One of the main things that helps you learn and helps you become better at surgery is trauma. And the volume that Parkland Hospital, which is the main hospital that we worked out of for that residency, was tremendous. We saw, whether it was car accidents, gunshot wounds, infections….

Daniel Lobell: (18:51)
Doctors are the only ones who get excited about this stuff. [Daniel laughs]

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (18:54)
Well, and obviously, these are people that are, you meet them, you meet the patients at their worst and really what you’re trying to do is give them your best. But in terms of an environment to learn how to take care of people that are in really, really bad situations, there was really no better. And so I think that was really the foundation for me in terms of figuring out, “All right, can I do this and can I do it well?” And so I’m really, really thankful for Parkland Hospital and UT Southwestern and all the faculty that were there. And really, my co-residents. You learn as much from the people that are alongside you at the same level as you do from the faculty, in medicine. It’s really incredible.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (19:30)
But when we relate that to the experience in France, so one of the things that the residency program that I was part of gave us was four months, during our fifth year, which is the last year of the residency, to do an elective rotation. You could do four different elective rotations, or you could do kind of a big block of them and it really gave us a lot of latitude. And so I decided to go to France for three months. At the time, my main goal was to be a shoulder surgeon, which has remained a big part of my career. It’s blended in with a lot of hip arthroscopy and sports medicine injuries that I treat. But at that particular time, shoulder was really my main thing. I was really zoned in on doing shoulder work, and some of the world’s greatest shoulder surgery was going on and is still going on in France. And so I kind of scoured the internet, looking for places to do something special and —

Daniel Lobell: (20:25)
Is there a reason for — sorry to interrupt you. Why would the best shoulder surgery be in France?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (20:29)
Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s great surgery that goes on everywhere, it’s just, they were sort of pushing the envelope in terms of shoulder instability, which what that means is when people dislocate their shoulder, if someone pops their shoulder out of joint, one of the main things that they were treating there differently, or a little bit differently than what we were doing, was that condition. And they were doing it with a procedure that was a little bit, an older surgery that had kind of come and gone a little bit in the United States and people were doing it less here, but they really stuck to it, but innovated it in a way that they were doing it through smaller incisions instead of one big open surgery.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (21:07)
So I really wanted to learn more about that, and found Dr. Lofas, who was in Annecy and I spent three months there. And so at the time we didn’t have any children. My wife came with me, we lived there for a few months and just really took in the culture. Europe is small when it comes to comparing it to the United States and so you’re able to do a lot of things, even if you just kind of take advantage of the weekends. So we loved it. Other than just learning a tremendous amount about orthopedic surgery and the possibilities we had with arthroscopic surgery, which is the surgery we do through small poke holes with a camera. You just got to meet new people, people from different countries of Europe that were also working there at the same time, and honestly, at the end of the day, those connections probably had a much larger impact on our lives, I think, than even sort of the details you learn about the surgical procedures, because those will change. Those will evolve as your career moves on. And obviously they’re important and we continue building on those, but what stays is the people that you did it with. And I think that that was just another opportunity to meet some great folks.

Daniel Lobell: (22:24)
It’s interesting. You really have this great teamwork mentality, maybe from your football background, but…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (22:30)
Maybe. Yeah, maybe that’s what I have to be thankful for for football. I think team sports, I think, teaches so much to those who participate in it. So, yeah, I mean, that’s true.

Daniel Lobell: (22:42)
Here’s my working theory on why there’s so many specialists in shoulder surgery in France. I think it’s all the shrugging that they do. [Guillaume laughs] “I don’t know!” All the shoulder shrugging, up and down…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (22:56)
Oh my goodness. You know, it’s incredible that you came with that. I really gave you a couple of minutes as I spoke and you’re sitting there thinking, “What is it with the shoulder surgery?” [Daniel laughs] I’ve been doing this for years and I never thought about it. So I think you’ve got it figured out. When we get done with this podcast, I think what we’ll do is we’ll get together a little randomized controlled trial, a really thorough medical study, and we’re going to figure this out. This is really the root of all this.

Daniel Lobell: (23:23)
We’ll get to the bottom of this.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (23:23)
Yeah, we are.

Daniel Lobell: (23:27)
So I was running wires through the wall the other day. And I was thinking it’s very difficult to do. There’s a little thing called, I think it’s called the mechanical hand. But it’s like the claw, basically, from the supermarket games where you try and pick up an egg with the claw and you can poke it through the hole to try and pull the wires through. And I was thinking, “Man, if I had those arthroscopic tools that the surgeons have, it would be so much easier to run wires through the wall.” Is it kind of a similar process, would you say? I mean, I don’t know how many wires you’ve run through the wall, but… And can I borrow your tools for some home repair?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (24:08)
[Guillaume laughs] It really is a similar process. The main difference being that our tools tend to be more expensive. And in medicine, unfortunately, everything just seems to cost more, but the process is really similar and actually, orthopedic surgeons, I think often joke that we are kind of a combination of mechanics, plumbers, electricians… You’re working with your hands, you’re putting things back together. The challenging part is though that you better be aware that if you have an orthopedic surgeon around, they’re going to think they can do all this stuff really well. And most cases that you should probably just call an electrician or a plumber or a mechanic. But no, a lot of the skill sets I think are very similar. I think that’s part of what I enjoy about orthopedic surgery. But as a funny story, as you were talking about running the wires through the wall that I’m thinking of, I was vacationing a few years back with some friends and a good friend dropped her driver’s license through a sewer grid.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (25:09)
And it wasn’t an incredibly deep sewer grid. But you certainly couldn’t lift it. It was too heavy to lift. That or it was soldered into place. But you couldn’t get your arm through it, but it was shallow enough to where we could try to get that license back. We could sort of see it, and it was dark in the evening. And so I thought to myself, “This is what I’ve been building up for. This is everything I’ve ever trained to do. And if I can’t get this driver’s license back then I don’t know that it’s all worth it.”

Daniel Lobell: (25:38)
Right. [Daniel chuckles]

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (25:40)
Just kidding. And so we were able to muster together some smores sticks, you know the sticks that you use to roast marshmallows on a fire pit, and get some smores sticks and some rubber bands and created an instrument that I was able to retrieve the driver’s license with. And honestly, at that point, I think I was really ready to retire. I felt like I’d accomplished everything I wanted to do in my career.

Daniel Lobell: (26:05)
[Daniel laughs] That’s it, huh?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (26:05)
I’d finally been able to prove to my friends that it was all worth it.

Daniel Lobell: (26:09)
This is it. This is what we trained for in medical school at Harvard. License plate retrieval.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (26:16)
Otherwise you got a nasty trip to the DMV. It would’ve taken her hours to get this solved. I mean, so really saved her a lot of trouble.

Daniel Lobell: (26:23)
Is Harvard Medical School as difficult as we’re all led to believe it is?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (26:29)
Great question. So my training at Harvard was my sports medicine fellowship. So this is a one-year experience and really what we’re doing there for a fellowship is, you’re learning a sub-specialty. So a very small portion of orthopedics. And for me, that was sports medicine and arthroscopic surgery through small incisions. So I could not tell you how difficult the students, the medical students have it in terms of getting through. Now, I think medical school is challenging no matter where you go. I think that most medical schools, of course, are all accredited in the United States through different accreditation programs. And so they have to meet certain standards, they’re all going to be challenging.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (27:13)
And so I think it’s such a competitive landscape just to get in that when people come to me and say, “Hey, what do I need to do to get into med school? Where should I go?” I say, the first thing is, get in somewhere. I mean, you can focus on where you’re going to go afterwards, after you know that you can go somewhere, but if you made it through anywhere, pat yourself on the back, it’s a challenging experience. But certainly, honesty, Harvard is a sort of a revered institution in all of the academics, in all of healthcare. And I’m sure to get in there is as hard or harder than anywhere else, very competitive. But for the fellowship for sports medicine, we did not interact with the medical students as often.

Daniel Lobell: (27:57)
So tell me a little bit about it. What’s the experience of doing the fellowship like?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (28:02)
Fellowship is incredible. It’s a very fun year, no matter where you do it. One of the perks of doing it through the Harvard system at Massachusetts General Hospital was that they cover the various sports teams that are in Boston. And as you know, the sports teams in Boston in the last decade have had a lot of success. So we covered the New England Patriots, we covered the Boston Bruins and the Boston Red Sox. And so really one of the exciting things was that any given season of sports that you were covering, you had a chance that the team you were covering was gonna go all the way and win a championship. And so the football team, the Patriots, did not win the year that I was there, but actually lost in the AFC conference championship game.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (28:49)
But nonetheless, it was a fun experience. Again, the people that you interact in those different settings was really, really a big part of the learning experience because the athletic trainers for an NFL team are so smart. They’ve been through so many — they’ve seen so many athletes come through. They’ve seen so many injuries that it’s really just an opportunity just to watch them at their craft and to see how they evaluate a knee injury, a hip injury, a shoulder injury, what do they tell the athlete? And of course at that level, the complexity of the conversations is much greater because it’s not just one person and one doctor. In the end, it is, right? You’re the doctor treating the patient, but there are a lot of surrounding factors and people that want to know things and that need to relay things to other people.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (29:39)
And those are those are the agents, the athletic trainer, the other doctors involved taking care of the team, the coaches, the players, family members who also want to understand things… At the root of it all, you have the athlete who’s the patient. And of course everything goes through them, right? And they have the ultimate right in terms of who knows what and what we do, but, in that system, it is a little bit more complex. So that was just great just to learn, to see how they use their resources, how they use the systems around them to take care of the athletes.

Daniel Lobell: (30:14)
That’s really interesting. And it sounds like Boston owes you a great debt of gratitude for… Would you say that you’re single-handedly responsible for breaking the curse of the Gambino? Would you…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (30:25)
Oh gosh. [Both chuckle] No, not at all. I’m certainly not responsible for anything Boston ever did well, and they’ve done a lot of good things, so, but no, we loved it. If anything, what I’m responsible for in Boston was just being able to go and enjoy some, some good sports matches. Just as a spectator and a happy bystander on the sideline for some games.

Daniel Lobell: (30:51)
They should bring out the orthopedic surgeons like when a team wins a Super Bowl or something. It’d be like, “And here’s the orthopedic surgeon!”

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (30:58)
Yeah, it’s interesting. They’re there. Those folks are always on the sidelines for NFL and college games. The orthopedic staff is on site. And so when the championships happen, of course, they’re out there and they’re obviously celebrating a long season of hard work, keeping these folks healthy. But they’re usually not on camera, which is actually where you want to be. If you’re a physician you want your product, which is the folks that you have helped heal. Those are the folks that need to be highlighted. And those are the folks that if they succeeded, then you succeeded too,

Daniel Lobell: (31:37)
Well, you guys are using the tiny cameras, basically. You’re on microscopic cameras.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (31:42)
Just the tiny cameras. Yeah.

Daniel Lobell: (31:43)
So let’s talk about those tiny cameras for a second. When you do surgeries, arthroscopic surgeries, are you inserting a tiny camera into people? How small is the camera and how do you retrieve it?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (32:02)
Sure. So the camera is not a loose item that we put into the joint, but it’s really just more of a basically, if you think about it as like a eight or nine inch shaft, that’s about five millimeters or about half a centimeter wide, right? So think about it like a long pencil. And you’re making a small incision. That’s just a small poke hole. And oftentimes we’ll use several different poke holes depending on the angle that we need to have to reach different parts of the joint. And then once the camera’s in the joint, we can see everything in it. Now, a part of that is that the camera’s also hooked up to a light source. So there’s a cord, basically a fiber optic cord of light that connects to the camera and shines into the joint. Because otherwise inside the body anywhere, it would be too dark to see anything.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (32:52)
So we have the light cord and you’ve got the camera, and then the other thing that’s very important, and this is not just in orthopedic surgery, but also in abdominal surgery where general surgeons look inside the abdomen and the belly and different organs, you have to have something to sort of open up the joint to spread the tissues apart. And in arthroscopic surgery for joints, that’s basically salt water, so a saline solution, and it just helps clear out any, if there’s any small amounts of bleeding it can clear that out, you can see well. And in the abdomen, usually it’s a gaseous substance that they put in there just to be able to see. So that’s one of the slight differences there.

Daniel Lobell: (33:35)
And that also keeps the camera lens probably unobstructed. I don’t think there’s a little windshield wiper on it, right? So…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (33:42)
Yeah, exactly. We don’t have the wiper, but we do have a little lever that they can turn on suction on and off on the camera. And that basically you can control how much flow of this salt water, saline, that’s in the joint. So if it does get a little bit blurry or, and the blurriness in the body is usually because of small amounts of blood, then you can wash that out. You can basically suction out a little bit of this sort of bloody water and put in new, fresh water. But realistically, this saltwater, the saline, is continuously pumping into the joint and at the same time continually being suctioned out.

Daniel Lobell: (34:22)
Pretty amazing. Are there any things on the horizon that you’ve seen in terms of arthroscopic surgery that are going to be game changers, like before we had the camera, that would be a huge difference. Like what’s the next camera?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (34:39)
Yeah. So interesting, there have been. And so the cameras that we use in surgery, there’s a few different companies that have developed similar cameras that are even smaller, that actually now are being used in the office. So some patients come into a clinic just to see what’s wrong with them, how you examine their knee. And actually they have small enough devices that can be used just with a little bit of numbing medicine to look inside the joint while they’re sitting there awake in the office. Now, those have more limited utility. You can’t obviously fix things. You can just kind of see them and look at things. But certainly that’s a tremendous development from the standpoint of technology, right? I mean, as we know, with any technology, it’s getting faster and more powerful and usually smaller, right? And so this evolution has been happening in medicine as well, and what the next 10, 15 years will bring, who knows? It’ll be incredible.

Daniel Lobell: (35:43)
So outside of cameras, what technology are you excited about?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (35:50)
One of the things that’s very exciting that I think is on the horizon that we don’t quite know yet how much it’s going to have an impact for orthopedics and for healthcare in general is the field, the general field of biologics. And that’s something where basically you’re using a tissue, it could be human tissue, tissue from your own body, from someone else’s body, or processed proteins or substances that can really help with the healing process. And the ones you’ve probably heard of are stem cells. We hear a lot about stem cell research and a lot about the ethical conversations around it. But I think that the field overall of biologics, as it’s kind of termed over if you include all of it, is interesting.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (36:38)
What I think happens when you see any major new fields crop up is that people just rush to use a whole lot of stuff. And we don’t really know kind of what the full benefits of it will be and how we can best use it for our patients’ benefits. And the other thing you see is that initially, these things cost a tremendous amount of money. And so I’m always careful, I think when recommending treatments that were… We want to take the best care of the patient possible. We also want to be cost-effective. And I think the value that you provide and the value equation is basically the improvement that the patient will see divided by the overall cost. And that cost can be calculated in a whole lot of different ways. It could be the cost of the patient, the cost of the insurance company, the cost of the hospital.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (37:27)
And the most important value equation is the one that the patient experiences, right? So usually it’s their cost. And it’s not just money. Sometimes it’s recovery time, that’s a cost. The amount of help that they’ll need from their family, that could be a cost too. Bringing that back to the conversation about biologics, they cost a lot of money. We don’t quite know exactly what their potential is and where they’re going to be best served. So I’m really interested in seeing how that evolves over the next decade or so. There’s a lot of research that’s going into that. And we’ll know more soon, I think that right now, there are certainly some utilities for biologics, but they always sort of require the caveat and the conversation with the patient of, “This may help you. But it also may not.” And it a lot of times comes with an out of pocket cost that some can afford and some can’t, in the healthcare system that we have today. So hopefully if we identify over time that some of these things are really, really helpful, then number one, their costs will hopefully go down, but also insurance companies and whoever’s paying for it for medical services will start to adopt them and pay for them more readily.

Daniel Lobell: (38:44)
Has the data been promising so far?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (38:47)
To be honest with you, some of it has, and some of it has been just kind of a little bit all over the place. And so you just have to be careful and this is where I think a product like Doctorpedia or a platform like Doctorpedia comes in, right? I think there’s a whole lot out there. There’s information about everything and anything, and people sort of trying to sell you something. And we almost want to think that healthcare is not in the sales business, but unfortunately it absolutely is. And so when we were looking for things online, a lot of times, these sort of breakthrough technologies and breakthrough treatments, some of them may be really, really amazing and provide a tremendous amount of value, but there’s also a lot out there that also leaves a lot to be desired and may not do everything it says it will, right? And for some of these treatments, stem cells included, I think that there’s a lot of over promising that’s happening. And certainly a lot of folks that are left disappointed with a little bit lighter checkbook or wallet. So right now, for me, it’s very selective use. And for the most part, I tell my patients that we just don’t know. And I’m as eagerly waiting as they may be, to see kind of where this goes.

Daniel Lobell: (40:08)
I personally appreciate when a doctor says, “I don’t know,” because you know that whatever they tell you they do know, they probably know.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (40:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Lobell: (40:17)
So it’s that vulnerability, even if it’s not exactly what you want to hear, makes you feel like, “Okay, this guy or girl, or woman, sorry, is on the level with me.” And I feel like they’re not just… They’re talking to me, it’s a very good doctor-patient relationship because they’re talking to you not as like, “I know everything and you don’t,” but like, “Look, I’m going through this with you and I’m going to do my best for you.” And I appreciate that personally, as a patient.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (40:48)
Yeah. I think that’s important. I think the root of good medicine, good healthcare is that it all starts with questions and bringing the right questions to the table. And so usually if anyone claims to know all the answers, as a patient, I would tend to run the other way. I think that’s sort of my perception, but as a doctor, I think that’s the advice I can give patients. That if someone seems overconfident on something, sometimes it’s good to question it a little bit. But where Doctorpedia comes in with this, and where I think it can have a difference, is just at least having somewhere where people can go, where they can rely on the information, right? If the information is provided by people who are board certified, they’re vetted, we can trust who they are.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (41:37)
We can trust their background and their training. And if someone knows that they have a place like that that they can go and get information that’s easy to understand, not overly confusing with a bunch of different, complicated medical words, that’s somewhere where you can trust, right? And I think trust is at the core of healthcare. For me, when I treat a patient, I always tell them that I can’t promise them their outcome. But I can promise them that I’m going to do my best to help them. And I think from there, I can start building more of a trust relationship with them. That I’m in it with them. I’m supportive of their needs. And never do you want, I think, promise the absolute outcome because there’s so many factors that go into that. But tell them you’re going to fight for them, you’re going to do what you can, whether that’s structurally, whether that’s helping them navigate the system, whether that’s helping them find the right resources to rehab. And then I think that you have someone that’s on your team. As a patient —

Daniel Lobell: (42:42)
Teamwork mentality.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (42:42)
— you have someone that you know is… Right. It comes back all the time, right? You have someone that’s going to go to bat for you.

Daniel Lobell: (42:48)
From now on, I’m only going to doctors that are former athletes. That’s it. I’ve made my mind up.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (42:53)
[Guillaume laughs] There you go. I’m just really trying to help out those other former athletes out there.

Daniel Lobell: (42:59)
So let’s talk about your role in Doctorpedia and what the listeners can hopefully find from you on the site.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (43:08)
Yeah, so Doctorpedia obviously is still in its early stages, although growing fast. And one of the things that I hope to be able to contribute to it, number one is good, high quality, easy to understand content that’s going to be mostly in video format where I can describe injuries and describe what the treatment options are. And somehow just give them some peace of mind in terms of the process that they’re about to go through, whether they just got injured and just want to know, “Hey, how does this hip injury typically get treated?” or, “Hey, I just had surgery. What’s my recovery supposed to look like?” Instead of looking all over YouTube and all over different resources for videos and blogs, although those can have good information. What I want to provide through Doctorpedia is somewhere where they know they’re going to get that reliable information.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (43:56)
And so for me, video content is going to be king with Doctorpedia. Being able to make as much of that, and also help the platform curate some of this video to make sure that we’re always giving the highest quality video, make sure that everything that gets put on Doctorpedia can be trusted. Because just like healthcare research, I think that a product like Doctorpedia is going to require continuous improvement, continuous monitoring. And that’s one of the things that led me to want to participate in the platform and be a part of it, is that the team really seems to be focused on that. Not just say, “Hey, we want to put out this material and just kind of see what happens and let people access it.” They are really focused on putting out material, but then continuously making it better. Continuously assessing it and being critical of it and making sure that it’s still the best content out there. And so that, I think, is really a noble cause, and why I wanted to contribute to that content and be a part of it.

Daniel Lobell: (44:59)
Absolutely. I feel like I could talk to you all day and I’m sure that your time does not allow for that cause you’re very busy. And to be honest, I don’t have that much time either. I got stuff going on too, doctor! But…

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (45:12)
[Both chuckle] Hey, listen. I hear ya. No, it’s been a great conversation. I really enjoyed talking to you. And I think one of the things that’s important when you’re learning about your doctors, figuring out, how are they? I mean, can you have a conversation with them? And so if I was evaluating you as my doctor, I’d be thrilled right now. Cause I think that I could have a conversation with you. I could hang out for a while. So this has been fantastic.

Daniel Lobell: (45:37)
Thank you. I think that’s probably where your thrills would end with regards to me being your doctor. But that’s a very nice compliment. I wanted to ask you one thing before we wrap and that is, and I hope I say it right, one of the things you do is hip labral tears. Did I say it correctly or is it labral tears?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (45:58)
Almost. Yeah, labral tears. There you go. I was going to say, you got the hip part correct, but… yeah. Hip labral tears. So my main specialty. So we mentioned earlier that I went to France, really looking for that experience in shoulder surgery, but then as I went through sports medicine fellowship, one of the injuries and the techniques that really caught my attention that I wanted to learn more about was hip arthroscopy. Arthroscopies are the same type of procedure with the camera, you want to do small incisions into the joint, but for the hip. And where this was different is that the hip was a very constrained or tight joint and much deeper than the shoulder or the knee to get to. And so that has led to substantial difficulties over the years for people to access it and treat the injuries that people had.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (46:45)
It doesn’t mean that those injuries weren’t happening, it just meant that we didn’t have the right tools and the right techniques to get to that. And so with hip arthroscopy, we do. And one of the main injuries that we see are hip labral tears. And the labrum is basically, it’s a type of cartilage that goes around the edge of the socket. And it really, it adds stability to the hip. It wraps around the ball and basically gives you a joint that’s sturdy, steady. The labrum helps with the flow of fluid, normal fluid within the joint that helps nourish the cartilage. But one of the things that the labrum also does, that’s not really one of its functions, but unfortunately it’s a associated factor, is that if you tear it, it really hurts. And so when patients have labral tears, now that we have a way to repair those, through the arthroscope, we can really improve their quality of life, help them get back to normal function with their hip.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (47:43)
And sometimes even that means getting back to the sports and athletics, but yeah. Treating hip labral tears has been one of the focuses of my career. It actually has become, really, more than half of the procedures that we do, that I do. So it has really been a satisfying part of it. One of the parts that’s actually really satisfying about is that because it’s something that’s relatively new in the world of orthopedic surgery, it’s really evolved substantially over the last 20 years, there are less folks that are trained to do it. And so the gratitude that you see in patients when they find someone that finally can treat their problem has been tremendous. And so it’s really nice to be able to come in, come to a community and offer that, because they finally have somewhere they can get relief.

Daniel Lobell: (48:34)
Well, the reason it caught my eye and the reason it’s near and dear to my heart is my youngest brother, when he was younger, got hit by a school bus. And I told him I was going to be speaking with you. And he said, “Oh, tell him I have a hip labral tear. And that I had a surgery on it.” And he said there was an impingement and they had to shave down the bone. And I said, “How is it now?” And he said, “It still hurts.” I said, “Okay, I’m going to ask him about it.” Is there anything you can do?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (49:07)
Yeah. So, and obviously, not a funny situation, but the impingement is very common to have when people have labral tears. One of the main reasons people get labral tears is hip impingement, which means that the ball and the socket are not perfectly round. That extra bone really can pinch the labrum and lead to a tear. So when you repair the labrum, oftentimes you’ll also shave some of this bone to make it more round, essentially. And so of course, if people have pain after that procedure, there’s different things that could be causing it. It could be scar tissue in the joint. It could be residual impingement or bone that’s still pinching the labrum. Occasionally it could be that the labrum retears, but there’s a variety of things that can cause residual pain after any surgery.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (49:56)
But certainly in most cases it’s a successful operation. And when I say successful, it doesn’t mean that it takes away all the pain. And I think that’s where that sort of trust and honesty part of it comes with the surgeon relationship. Everyone I do this procedure on I tell them, “We’re not going to make your hip perfect. What we’re trying to do is make it better and make it better enough that that has value to you. That you feel like it was worthwhile going through the procedure.” But yeah, generally speaking, it’s a great operation. But of course, it certainly has its limitations.

Daniel Lobell: (50:32)
Well, I’ll tell him if he’s still in pain, maybe he should give you a call one of these days and you can take a look.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (50:37)
Yeah, there you go. Maybe come to South Carolina, we’ll take a look at it.

Daniel Lobell: (50:40)
[Daniel laughs] Would be worth the trip. Doctor, it was such a pleasure speaking with you. I’m going to ask you the question I ask all the doctors to round off the interview. What do you do to stay healthy?

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (50:51)
So I think that in the past year and a half or so, that has shifted, right? I think a lot of our lifestyle habits have changed, with COVID-19 pandemic and just the way that we live our lives. But for me, I found that the best way to stay healthy has been what I eat. And so that has generally been, if you asked anyone that knows me, not a strong point. I think my diet has evolved. In the past year and a half, I’ve really tried to stay closer to the vegetables, greens, and stay away from too many meats, sweets, things like that.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (51:31)
Now, certainly anyone will tell you that it’s a combination of diet and exercise are sort of like the key things, but for me, I found that wow, I could eat so much food, and then the time available to exercise was limited, right? And the impact that had that eating better seemed to be more. I felt like I could have a bigger impact on my health by eating better than I could have by exercise. Now, reality is that I think you need both to be healthy, but if you’re going to start in one place, for me, it was eating right. And I think that that’s what I would encourage people to do. We see so many people in our offices, right, that have various conditions that are related to poor diet, whether that’s obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and so many of their joint problems can be solved just with weighing a little bit less or losing some of that weight. And it’s not easy, but I think it starts with a healthy diet.

Daniel Lobell: (52:24)
As my friend Mark Schiff, the great comedian, always says, “It’s always about the food.”

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (52:30)
That’s right.

Daniel Lobell: (52:30)
That’s his advice all the time. It’s always about the food. Change the diet, work on the food. Thank you so much, Dr. Dumont. I hope we can do something else in the future because I really had a blast talking with you. And I feel like, as I mentioned earlier, I have so many more questions and we only have so much time. So thank you so much.

Dr. Guillaume Dumont: (52:52)
Daniel, it’s been a pleasure and absolutely, we’ll reconnect. And maybe we can answer some more questions and you can give me some more jokes. I enjoyed it.

Daniel Lobell: (53:00)
In the meantime, I’ll go and check out your stuff on Doctorpedia and encourage the listeners to do the same. Thank you so much.

Daniel Lobell: (53:12)
This podcast or any written material derived from its transcripts represents the opinions of the medical professional being interviewed. The content here is for informational purposes only, and should not be taken as medical advice since every person is unique. Please consult your healthcare professional for any personal or specific needs.