Lizzie Bond knows a thing or two about high performance sport.
She's spent decades observing it in New Zealand as wife to triple Olympic gold medallist Hamish Bond as well as being an orthopaedic surgeon in her own right.
However, the six-month fellowship she's currently on at the prestigious Duke University in the US is giving her a unique taste of American sports medicine which is starkly different to the system she trained in.
For one thing, the surgeons are embedded with the teams; attending trainings, working with athletes daily and even flying around the country to games.
Bond says while in New Zealand surgeons often only see an athlete after they’ve been injured, at Duke they place a lot of importance on seeing an injury as it occurs and trying to understand what has happened to the joint.
"There was a football player who ruptured his medial collateral ligament and his posterior cruciate ligament and we examined him on the field and the feel you get for that injury is quite different before the knee's swollen, before there's any muscle guarding and before it's particularly painful," Bond said.
"They really feel like getting to examine the knee at time zero is really important, get a lot of information out that."
Bond also got to spend time with Duke’s Blue Devils basketball team - one of the most successful in the US university system - and travelled with them to a game in Miami.
"We flew with the team, private buses straight from the tarmac to your hotel - quite an experience."
Bond added it’s a luxury that is helped by the scale and resource in the US which is something that’s different to back home.
“I spent a whole weekend travelling with the basketball team in Miami and there wasn't a single injury [so] did you need an orthopaedic surgeon there? Probably not, if you're being practical about it and I think New Zealanders are very practical."
Bond is also getting to experience cutting edge research and new surgery techniques like the Bridge Enhanced ACL Repair or BEAR method where rather than replacing the knee ligament, it’s stitched back together and secured using bovine collagen.
"Because the population's so big and where we are, they just get access to all of these things early. It just requires you to look at things critically – is this a good idea? Do we have the data to back it up or a great marketing team?"
While she’s yet to be convinced on some of their processes there are other things Bond says we could learn from.
"They've very aggressive with their rehab and they get people back to sport very quick."
"It's opened my eyes a little bit and we're probably a little too on the conservative side in terms of some of these injuries based on what I’ve seen here."
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