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DEAN’S MESSAGE WARD ROUNDS NEWS RESEARCH FEATURES ALUMNI NEWS UPCOMING EVENTS Doctor’s Dream Job with Bulls Sets Tone for Career DUNK Written by: Bob Kronemyer When the Chicago Bulls basketball team first came on the scene in 1966, alumnus David Bachman, MD ’62, GME ’67, could not afford to attend games because he was earning only $250 a month as an orthopaedic resident at Northwestern University Medical School. But that quickly changed when he became the Bulls’ team physician during the second season. “Basically, the pay was four season tickets and a nominal stipend,” Dr. Bachman says. The Bulls had gone through its first year without a team physician. “The NBA told them to get a doc,” recalls Dr. Bachman, now 78, who played softball and baseball growing up. After completing his residency in 1967, he was appointed to the medical school faculty and joined an established private orthopaedic practice at Passavant Hospital in Chicago. p.24 — wardroundsonline.com
At that time, the general manager of the Bulls was Dick Klein, who had been a Northwestern undergraduate classmate of Harold Method, MD, a general surgeon at Northwestern. Klein asked Dr. Method if he would assume the role of team physician, which he did for a few months. “However, Dr. Method, who I knew from Passavant, had limited interest in attending Bulls’ games, which was one of the requirements,” says Bachman. Hence, Dr. Method approached Dr. Bachman about taking the position, which he enthusiastically accepted. Dr. Bachman’s duties included conducting preseason physicals for the 12 players on the roster and treating significant injuries (either conservatively or surgically). As an orthopaedic surgeon, he performed fewer than a dozen surgeries, primarily knee, during his 13 years as team physician. Players included Artis Gilmore, Chester “Chet” Walker, and Jerry Sloan (later head coach for the Utah Jazz). And for most of those years, the Bulls made the playoffs, but not a single league championship. “Many of the players and coaching staff back then were real gentlemen — educated and deeply involved in the community,” observes Dr. Bachman. A life of sports Around 1976, Dr. Bachman cofounded and served as director of the Center for Sports Medicine at Northwestern. “At the time, my colleagues and I were seeing high school, college, and professional athletes,” he says. “We learned that one of the problems faced by high school athletes was a lack of adequate medical care. There were no athletic trainers. The coaches were responsible for determining whether a player was seriously injured and for rehabilitation after an injury. But this really wasn’t appropriate, so we instituted a successful program to train high school teachers to become athletic trainers.” From approximately 1972 to 1986, Dr. Bachman also wrote a weekly Chicago Tribune syndicated sports medicine column for a lay audience. Popular topics were running, cycling, and tennis. Not only did he share his literary talent in the newspaper, he has also co-written four books including, “The Use of Forensic Anthropology,” with Robert Pickering, Ph.D, another Northwestern alum. In the late 1970s, Dr. Bachman chaired a committee for the governor’s commission on sports medicine in Illinois, which had the same goal as the Center for Sports Medicine: attempting to improve medical care for high school athletes. Lured by mountains Dr. Bachman left his position with the Bulls in 1980 to move to southwestern Colorado, after several years of vacationing in the mountains with his wife. There, Dr. Bachman developed a small horse ranch. “I was also able to go down the valley to play golf on Wednesdays and up the mountain to ski at Telluride on Sundays,” he says. In addition, he was elected county coroner for 13 years. He also acted as medical director for the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team for nearly all his years in Colorado. Upon retiring from private practice as an orthopaedic surgeon in 1993, Dr. Bachman and his wife relocated to Denver, where both their children and grandchildren had resettled. Two years later, Dr. Bachman started medical consulting for the Western Areas of the U.S. Postal Service, which in 1997 Drs. John Hefferon, MD ‘73; Proctor Anderson, MD ‘72, GME ‘77; and Bates Noble, MD, GME ‘70, were all partners of alumnus David Bachman (2nd from left) AT MEDICAL ASSOCIATES OF CHICAGO. Noble and Hefferon later succeeded Bachman as team physicians of the Bulls. “Proctor covered for all of us when we were traveling and also was responsible for maintaining our sanity,” says Dr. Bachman. turned into senior area medical director position for the Western Area. Later, the Pacific Area was added, which expanded in 2006 to national medical administrator for the Postal Service. In that role, he supervised a team of approximately 50 physicians and 150 nurses across the country that implemented a medical case management program that significantly slowed the escalating costs of workers’ compensation and returned employees back to work more quickly. Reflecting on his years in sports medicine, Dr. Bachman believes that today’s athletes are much savvier about preventing injury. Furthermore, less invasive arthroscopy now generally allows people to recover faster and return to daily activities. ward rounds Fall/Winter 2012 — p.25
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Page 35 and 36: In Memoriam Joseph H. Baum, Unknown

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