.jpg_600.jpg)
Dr. Bryan Van Dyke is the newest member of the Summit Orthopaedics team, and he is excited to be in Eastern Idaho.
Dr. Van Dyke and his wife, Meagan, just moved to Idaho in August and were able to welcome their new baby boy to the world in September.
Dr. Van Dyke is a fellowship-trained orthopaedic surgeon who specializes in disorders of the foot and ankle. He grew up in Durham, North Carolina and completed his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering at Duke University. From there he worked for a year as a biomedical engineer with the Artificial Heart Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
After that, Dr. Van Dyke completed his five-year residency at Doctors Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. One additional year was spent doing fellowship training at the Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Center in Westerville, Ohio, focused on advanced foot and ankle surgery.
Dr. Van Dyke has always felt a draw toward medicine, especially since he was raised in a family of medical providers.
“I come from a medical family,” he said. “My dad’s a doctor, he did ER for many years. My mom’s a nurse, and my sister’s a nurse as well. So our family discussions were often about medical experiences.”
Beyond growing up with doctors and nurses in the family, Dr. Van Dyke has always been interested in the body and how it works.
“We find things that are broken in the body, like torn muscles or broken bones or worn out joints, and then we fix them,” he said. “That was what really fascinated me about orthopaedics.”
Dr. Van Dyke’s specialty is foot and ankle surgery, and he is the first doctor in the area to provide total ankle replacements.
“Where I did my fellowship, I was actually able to train with two of the designers of one of the total ankle implants,” Dr. Van Dyke said. “A total ankle replacement is basically a resurfacing of your ankle joint to get rid of the arthritis and still maintain motion and relieve your pain.”
The total ankle replacement involves using metal and plastic components to reconstruct the ankle and replace arthritic joint surfaces.
“As you develop arthritis, you have pain in that joint, you have decreased motion in the joint, and that’s when you start being a candidate for ankle replacement,” Dr. Van Dyke said.
Not everyone with arthritis in their ankle will need a total ankle replacement, but it is an option.
“We always exhaust all the other options first before we consider somebody for surgery,” Dr. Van Dyke said.
Other options to relieve pain prior to surgery might include oral anti-inflammatories (ibuprofen), steroid injections into the joint, braces, or physical therapy.
No matter the condition that his patients have, Dr. Van Dyke is committed to developing a treatment plan with each patient to get them back to doing what they enjoy.
Other services Dr. Van Dyke is involved in include revision surgeries, deformity corrections, tendon and ligament repair, heel pain, and treatments for sprains, fractures, and dislocations.
“We have a really good team here,” Dr. Van Dyke said. “At Summit Orthopaedics we cover all aspects of orthopaedic care. Any kind of problem that people have, we’re happy to see them. It’s nice because since we’re all working together, we stay in touch and we can refer patients back and forth to each other and make sure we’re giving the best care.”