The Good Doctor

See below to hear the late Dr. Mike Aronow on a call for hundreds of healthcare professionals just ~10 days after Covid in March 2020

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Orthopedist Mike Aronow might just be the #1 doctor in America, like ever.  I am biased – I played basketball most Sunday mornings with Mike for 15 years in Hartford and so his tragic loss to a catastrophic stroke this week at 62 is heartbreaking to those who knew the good doctor. Mike was a tireless advocate for orthopedic surgery formalizing competency standards both in the US and abroad. He was president of the American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society and Connecticut’s Orthopaedic Society, and the state named him orthopedist of the year in 2023.  But Mike stood out in quieter ways, like on the sideline diagnosing a kid’s ankle roll, and in the OR teaching a student. In an era when it seems everything has a price, when everyone wants to be paid for every service, call, diagnosis and consult, Mike didn’t work that way.  He would take calls from parents desperate to have their kids knee or ankle looked at, dropping everything to have the family come over, even when it was 8 at night and he needed to do work for the next day’s surgery slate. There was no bill. He played team doctor to all the youth sports teams for his kids and was often playing doctor on the sidelines of our Sunday morning games.  Mike would show up usually a few minutes late probably because he’d been up til 2 am writing patient notes. He wore arm bands and a head band and always those blue scrubs. Sometimes he’d bring his son and oftentimes Mike would pick up his dribble around the foul line 75 feet from the hoop and heave a deep pass into a crowd of players, only to have it picked off.  He’d sigh and say something deadpan like ‘maybe I shouldn’t have thrown that,” but the guys would pick him up – “right idea doc” we’d say.  Mike was so smart that sometimes those games felt to him like his great challenge. He loved to play and it was an hour when, for a change, he was not the most skilled in the room.  He had to work for every pass and rebound and may have had the record for the least shot attempts - heck in the last 15 years he probably took fewer shots than some of the guys fire up on a single Sunday.  But that was in many ways his brilliance, his nature. He gave so much of himself to make people feel okay.  About two weeks after Covid spiraled in March 2020 Mike was juggling work but agreed to take a few minutes to be on the Friday Forum conference call series I did that spring on the effects of the virus on healthcare. It was a strange time and it was very much Mike to do that call with me and that panel amidst the zillion things on his plate.  I listened to the recording of that call today on the day Mike’s family and friends had to say goodbye to him – you can hear him from his cell phone telling me about telemedicine. “You can’t take an x-ray…but you can have someone point to where it hurts, and hear their story, and listen to them.”  That was Mike—generous, unassuming, reassuring, and most of all calming…sort of who he was on the court and to his many friends, patients, and his family…To hear the good doc from that call click here for the recording and say a prayer. We could all use a doc like Mike Aronow in our lives…