Turning Pro
in Sports Medicine

By day Dr. Lisa Callahan mostly treats women with sports injuries. She’s an expert in the field who literally wrote the book on women’s fitness. Then at night she worries about her really tough cases—the 14 big guys on the New York Knicks pro basketball team.



By Marion Blackburn


That’s a pattern Lisa Rowland Callahan, B.S. ’83, M.D. ’87, has followed since her childhood in Washington, N.C.  While other girls were content to play with their dolls, she took hers apart. When she received a transistor radio for her birthday, she dismantled it as well. It was more interesting figuring out how her toys worked than playing with them.

Callahan edited her high school paper and arrived at ECU on a full scholarship. She gravitated toward science and medicine and graduated magna cum laude before completing her M.D. at ECU’s Brody School of Medicine in 1987.

Nineteen years later, she’s admired as one of New York’s best sports medicine doctors. She is medical director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, where she sees professional and recreational athletes. She also is director of player care for basketball’s Knicks and the New York Liberty of the WNBA. She lives in a stylish apartment on the Upper West Side a block off Central Park.

She writes a fitness column for Self magazine and turns up on TV frequently as a guest on Good Morning America, the Today Show and the Lifetime channel. Callahan’s best-selling book, The Fitness Factor: Every Woman’s Key to a Lifetime of Health and Well-Being, was published in 2002 and is now available in paperback. She is a former host of Recipe for Health on the Food Network.

“I never set out to be the first in anything, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” she says before catching a plane to Houston to serve as a trainer at the NBA All-Star Game.              


Journalism to knee joints

Though Callahan didn’t set out to rewrite the rules, she often did just that. There were no women doctors in rural eastern North Carolina when she was growing up, but she imagined herself one just the same. A turning point was a knee injury she suffered in college. Unimpressed with her medical care, she realized doctors weren’t always attuned to women athletes and their unique needs.

“They said, ‘Nothing is broken; go home.’ I thought, maybe nothing is broken but something is messed up,” she remembers. “I basically figured out how to rehab my own knee. That really got me interested in sports injuries.

“Because of those experiences along the way, I didn’t feel [women’s] issues were taken as seriously. There were questions, such as, ‘Why, when I’m running a lot, do my periods stop?’ There weren’t good answers for that.”

As a family medicine doctor, Callahan, 44, emphasizes a person’s overall health, compared with specialty approaches that focus on specific concerns such as joints.

Before choosing medicine she excelled in journalism. She was editor of her high school literary magazine and attended the Governor’s School for the gifted in 1978, where she edited the newspaper, The Fourth Estate.

ECU welcomed her with an Alumni Honors Scholarship and she took classes in many subjects before choosing biochemistry. Her undergraduate research was on fetal alcohol syndrome. Her brother, Greg Rowland ’81, and sister Melanie Rowland ’87 MBA ’89, also graduated from ECU.

Dr. Chris Bremer, professor emeritus of family medicine at ECU’s Brody School of Medicine, remembers Callahan as an enthusiastic student who sought solutions to health concerns. “She’s done a lot without a lot of fanfare,” he says. “But she doesn’t just think in terms of women’s issues. She thinks in terms of being a doctor.”

Her expertise in family medicine was recognized when she became the first full-time family medicine physician to join the faculty of the Hospital for Special Surgery. This hospital, which focuses on muscle and skeletal health, including orthopedics and rheumatology, provides team physicians for the New York Knicks, WNBA Liberty, the New York Giants and the New York Mets, among others.

“Most people think of sports medicine as orthopedics. But there’s more family medicine to it than they realize,” Bremer says. “Family medicine physicians can think about the whole patient and the way things work together, instead of just as an organ system. For instance, if a patient who’s pregnant wants to work out, a family medicine doctor can help her find the best program. An orthopedist can help with a groin pull, but who will help an athlete who is asthmatic? There are many things that don’t fall into one niche.”


A pattern of firsts

Sports medicine programs were just beginning when Callahan graduated from medical school. She became the first fellow of a nascent program at the San Jose Medical Center, part of the Stanford University School of Medicine. She also directed the San Jose faculty practice before moving to New York with her husband, Mark, in 1994. There she took a job as an assistant team physician for the football Giants. She was recruited by fellow Pirate Ronnie Barnes (see accompanying story).

Even in Manhattan she found her ideas were considered novel. She became the first family medicine physician to receive an academic promotion at Cornell University, where she is associate professor of clinical medicine. At the Hospital for Special Surgery, she and a colleague started the Women’s Sports Medicine Center, treating women athletes competing in the Olympics, World Cup Soccer, the World Rowing Championships and Federation Cup Tennis. The center became a model for others like it nationwide.

When she encountered gender bias along the way she followed her own game plan. “Every woman who is one of the first in their field probably goes through some tough experiences,” she says. “But a certain amount of that comes with the territory. You have to just get beyond it. If you don’t let little things derail you and just show people what you are and what you can do, then gender very quickly does not become an issue.”

It’s not an issue inside her office at Madison Square Garden, where the players tower above her petite frame. The players are unbelievably tall and amble around like giants. But they smile and soften up with their favorite doc, Lisa Callahan.

“The players look at her like a big sister and she has a way of getting them to understand, almost an instinct, that they really respond to,” says Roger Hinds, the team’s head athletic trainer. “She helps them see that we are really concerned about their welfare. She breaks down the barriers, and develops trust. Once they trust you, they become more comfortable with allowing you to take care of them.”



It’s all in the attitude

Like many raised in eastern North Carolina, Callahan spent time working in tobacco fields. Her father was a farmer and her mother was from Berkley, Calif. The combination of down-to-earth values and California-style creative thinking gave her unusual drive and initiative.

“My father always said, ‘You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control your response to it. It’s all in your attitude.’ He instilled in me that you don’t have to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

She tries to keep that positive attitude with her players, including the women athletes on the Liberty. “There are days I have to play psychologist, and days I have to play mom,” she says. “Days I play big sister and days I have to play cop. I wear a lot of different hats.

“Many people see these athletes as celebrities. I just see them as patients. You can’t be star struck, you can’t be emotional. You just have to do your job as a doctor and make good decisions.”

She remains dedicated to reshaping ideas about health, especially for women who may think sports are just another way to lose weight. Her research focuses on stress fractures and she has authored publications on women athletes and pregnancy, bone health, running injuries and women’s competitive sports.

“Society still tends to treat exercise in the case of women as a means to be thin,” she says. “Women are really judged on a cosmetic basis. A lot of times girls and women get this message and take it to an extreme. That leads to problems.

“If there is a message, we have to teach girls and women that exercise is not about being thin,” she says. “It’s about being physically strong.”

A life-long athlete, Callahan and her husband are avid cyclists and skiers. Her husband also is a doctor, a former Robert Wood Johnson research fellow in internal medicine. They have no children but love their dog, Jamaica.

She plans to continue pressing her ideas on women’s health. “I always preach that exercise is one of the most important tools we have for keeping ourselves and our body healthy,” she says. “The next big thing we have to change is to make people understand that fitness and exercise are not just about looking good.”