Doctor Profile: David M. Donohue, MD

Dr. Donohue: My name is David Donohue. I’m an assistant professor at the University of South Florida and a surgeon at Florida Orthopaedic Institute. My specialty areas include orthopedic trauma and adult reconstruction. So adult reconstruction would be primary total hips and total knees or first time hip and knee replacements and then also specializing in redo operations for failed total hips. The common conditions that I would treat would be fractures of the upper extremities or lower extremities the pelvis and the hip socket. I did a year of specialty training and trauma surgery in Seattle in which we learned how to take care of more complicated injuries that go into the joints and are adjacent to the joints which tend to be a little bit harder to treat. And then on the adult reconstruction side of things, the most common pathology would be osteoarthritis of the hip or the knee.

What I like best about my job is being able to meet somebody that’s having a particularly bad day when they have a bad injury. Being able to explain their injury to them so that they have a solid understanding of what has happened to them and what I’m going to be able to do to make them better. Seeing them back in the office throughout their recovery and then seeing them progress back towards their normal level of function. In addition to being able to take care of patients in that respect, I also enjoy educating the residents and fellows and medical students.

So I was a resident at the University South Florida and I was honored when they asked me to stay on as faculty with the University and as a partner with the group. Dr. Sanders has done a phenomenal job building up the orthopedic trauma program here. It was started in 1987 and since then he’s been training some of the best fellows in trauma surgery across the country. So when I had the opportunity to go elsewhere for my fellowship I took that chance and went out west with my family for the year just to try to learn a different way of doing the same kinds of things I’ve been doing throughout the five years of residency and trauma surgery. It’s good to be adaptable and it doesn’t hurt to have a few more tools to adjust. So most of the time the patients that present to the office with osteoarthritis of the hip or the knee tend to be patients that are very active and that’s really what drives a lot of their symptoms so they’re not able to do the things that make them happy in life like golfing or cycling or hiking things like that. So on my return from Seattle, I did a second fellowship in arthroplasty surgery which was a total hips and with total knees. The discipline of trauma surgery is very similar to arthroplasty surgery and to be successful at either you have to have a thorough understanding of the anatomy as well as the mechanics that are necessary to create a stable fracture or to implant that total hip or a total knee in a way that’s going to last a lifetime.