Issue 028

August 2007

By Jim Page.

Mention the ‘Fight Doc’ in Orange County and you can only be talking about one person, and that’s Dr William Kessler. With a career in diagnosing and treating injuries from combat sports going back 13 years and patients including Tito Ortiz and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) light heavyweight champion Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson, it’s easy to see why he is one of the sport’s most respected chiropractors with affiliations to numerous fight teams.

Setting himself apart from the majority of doctors, Kessler has the advantage of having a sporting background himself. “I train whenever I can… but every time I put on a pair of shorts lately, somebody’s hurt so I’ve got to put the lab coat back on”! For the management of No-Limits training facility and its 1,000 members, having him on hand to immediately deal with injuries as they arise is a weight off their mind, as there’s no substitute for experience.

“Muay Thai, I’ll get a lot of rib injuries from the clinch and the knees. If it’s jiu-jitsu, we see some knee injuries, ankle injuries. The wrestlers tend to hurt their backs more than the other sports – and the boxers, its elbows and shoulders”.

According to Kessler, the main reason for injuries to linger on is due to unsuccessful diagnosis at the time it occurred. For this reason, he pledges to spend up to an hour-and-a-half with new patients, putting them through numerous orthopaedic tests to ensure that he reaches the correct diagnosis and, most importantly, any serious injuries are spotted quickly, with the appropriate course of treatment prescribed straight away. 

“That’s the key, some of these guys deal with an injury for six months and they come to me. ‘You’re the last resort doc, can you fix me? I heard you’ve been working with a lot of fighters’. And they’ve never had the proper testing, basically, they’ve been running about for six months with a tear they didn’t know about that’s not going to fix itself”.  

Holding a contract with an MRI scanning facility located a few hundred yards from his office, Dr Kessler has the technological support at hand to receive updates on the severity of a fighter’s injuries as soon as possible. “I’m not shy about sending people for MRI’s. The centre that I go to values me quite a bit, I send them a lot of business. I have a good relationship with the doctors over there who read my films and I get at least a report faxed over within 24 hours.”  

Professional fighters are often used to ignoring the pain of niggling injuries – almost to the point of sheer bloody-mindedness in some cases – and frequently find the call of the gym too tempting when rehabilitating a more serious injury. Dr Kessler has some advice if this sounds familiar to you. “How to train around an injury?  Get some ice on it, wrap it, get it as tight as you can, get it above your heart and give it some rest. The fighters I work with do that after every session and it works pretty good”.  

Info: www.ocfightdoc.com