Dr. Glen Crawford Humanitarian Seacoast NH

Dr. Glen Crawford Retires After 12 Years at AOSM

Atlantic Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine has officially announced the retirement of Dr. Glen Crawford, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon specializing in trauma and fracture care. Dr. Crawford has provided exceptional care to the Seacoast community since he joined the team at Atlantic Orthopaedics in 2011. He has been awarded the prestigious “Volunteer Surgeon of the Year Award” in recognition of his extensive volunteer work, and was named a Top Orthopedic Surgeon by New Hampshire Magazine in 2022.

“Dr. Crawford had a steadfast commitment to bettering the lives of his patients, whether here on the Seacoast or abroad. His volunteer work in Haiti, Tanzania and beyond is inspirational. We are excited to follow and support his continued mission trips through the Greater Newburyport Bura Alliance,” says Matt Lane, Executive Director at Atlantic Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine.

In a letter to his patients, Dr. Crawford wrote: “Looking back, I am filled with immense gratitude for the trust and confidence you have placed in me. It has been an honor and a privilege to be part of your health journey. While this decision comes with a heavy heart, it also brings an opportunity for you to continue receiving excellent care. Though I will miss seeing you at the clinic, I leave knowing that you are in good hands. Thank you for the privilege of being your doctor. I wish you continued health and happiness.”

Dr. Crawford partially credits his experience as a carpenter for fostering the skills that led him to pursue orthopedic surgery. Shortly after graduating from Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Crawford and his wife, Dr. Abkowitz Crawford, founded a volunteer project to train surgeons in developing nations. In the years since, they have traveled to Bhutan, Vietnam, South Africa, and Tanzania, often with their three children in tow. The Crawfords have been instrumental in providing instruction and introducing new technology to a medical center in Tanzania that they have returned to almost every year. 

The team at Atlantic Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine extends their deepest gratitude to Dr. Crawford for his dedication and the exceptional patient care he provided during his 12 years with us. We wish him all the best as he embarks on this new chapter of life.

NH Magazine names 8 AOSM Surgeons Top Docs!

NH Magazine Announces 2023 Top Docs

Each year, over 3,000 licensed New Hampshire physicians nominate their peers for the opportunity to receive the honor of ‘Top Doctor.’ Those named Top Doctors received the greatest number of recommendations within 55+ specialties, and the results are in! We think all of our docs are top, but this year, eight of our physicians were voted ‘Top Doctor,’ including:

Glen Crawford, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
Robert Eberhart, MD* – Top Doctor for Hand Surgery
Andrew McMahon, DO – Top Doctor for Sports Medicine
Mayo Noerdlinger, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
H. Matthew Quitkin, MD – Top Doctor for Hand Surgery
Akhilesh Sastry, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
William Sutherland, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
Tyler Welch, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery

Congratulations to all the 2023 Top Doctors!

Learn more about our providers in Portsmouth, NH and York, ME HERE. Or click HERE to make an appointment with our orthopaedic and sports medicine team.

*As of January 1, 2023 Dr. Robert Eberhart officially retired.

Dr. Glen Crawford Humanitarian Seacoast NH

Dr. Glen Crawford Featured As Portsmouth Regional Hospital’s Employee Spotlight

Click HERE to read the entire Portsmouth Regional Hospital Article.

Dr. Glen Crawford demonstrating C-arm and fracture table in OR completely equipped by donated equipment from the Crawfords and IMEC.

For more than 30 years, our very own Dr. Glen Crawford and his wife Dr. Sue Abkowitz have been spending a few weeks to a few months each year volunteering their time in countries such as Indonesia, Bhutan, Vietnam, South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.

They have built clinics, sent many 40-foot containers of medical equipment, supported educational and environment programs, developed sports programs and much, much more.

They recently were highlighted and interviewed for Portsmouth Regional Hospital’s Employee Spotlight to share about their adventures.

We are so grateful to have a humanitarian like Dr. Crawford on our team!

Dr. Sue Abkowitz, celebrating the bounty of goods (container of medical equipment and supplies) in rural Bura, Kenya.

Dr. Glen Crawford is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon specializing in trauma and fracture care. Since joining the practice in 2011, he has continued to offer exceptional service to Seacoast residents. In 2003, Orthopaedics Overseas (a division of HVO, Health Volunteers Overseas) awarded Dr. Crawford the prestigious “Volunteer Surgeon of the Year Award” in recognition of his extensive volunteer work in Tanzania. He has since traveled there over 17 times, providing patient care and introducing orthopedic technology to local physicians and hospitals.

As a result of his hard work and dedication to patient care, Dr. Crawford was named a Top Orthopedic Surgeon by New Hampshire Magazine in 2022.

NH Magazine Names AOSM Doctors, 2022 Top Docs

2022 Top Docs

Each year, over 3,000 licensed New Hampshire physicians nominate their peers for the opportunity to receive the honor of ‘Top Doctor.’ Those named Top Doctors received the greatest number of recommendations within 55+ specialties, and the results are in! We think all of our docs are top, but this year, seven of our physicians were voted ‘Top Doctor,’ including:
(Pictured below from left to right)

Glen Crawford, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
Robert Eberhart, MD – Top Doctor for Hand Surgery
Andy McMahon, DO – Top Doctor for Sports Medicine
Mayo Noerdlinger, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
H. Matthew Quitkin, MD – Top Doctor for Hand Surgery
Akhilesh Sastry, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery
William Sutherland, MD – Top Doctor for Orthopaedic Surgery

Congratulations to all the 2022 Top Doctors!

Learn more about our providers in Portsmouth, NH and York, ME HERE. Or click HERE to make an appointment with our orthopaedic and sports medicine team.

Dr. Crawford’s Adventures in Volunteering

Did you know Dr. Crawford has traveled extensively doing humanitarian work since the 1980s?

He has been particularly active in Tanzania, East Africa, where he has visited to teach African physicians in orthopedic surgery, help build new hospital facilities, and supply them with new equipment for better patient care (in partnership with the Greater Newburyport-Bura Alliance).

Please take a moment to watch this video he recently put together about his travels and learn a bit about his incredible humanitarian work!

Published April 23rd, 2020 

A Day in the Life of Dr. Crawford’s Volunteering, Week 2

March 13, 2019
Moshi, Tanzania, East Africa

Long bone fractures, such as the femur, tibia and humerus, make up the vast majority of our patients’ injuries. Traditionally, these mostly occurred from falls at a height, climbing a tree to get fruit. As Tanzania has become more developed in the past few decades, the injury patterns have changed dramatically. Very few people own cars here so they must rely on public transportation. It is very easy and quite inexpensive to travel long distances in buses. The drivers are usually young men and they often compete with each other for a reputation as the fastest driver. This predictably leads to catastrophes.  My first day volunteering in Tanzania, back in 2008, a speeding bus overturned with 67 people onboard.  Four died at the scene. The driver ran away. There are no emergency services here as we know, so the rest of the injured were loaded on a dump truck and brought on a two-hour drive to our hospital. Five more died en route. I was called down to the emergency room as the staff there were overwhelmed by the inundation of patients. Blood was everywhere and the injured were two-to-a-bed and covering the floor, making it hard to walk. My disaster training was helpful, but there are limits to what can be done in any situation like this, and we triaged the patients to do the most good for the greatest number. We had only a small amount of blood in the blood bank. One of the patients I was in charge of was a 29-year-old whose young daughter was uninjured. The mother was awake when she arrived but clearly had significant abdominal bleeding. She had lost so much blood I could not find a vein to start intravenous fluids, so I had to make an incision (without anesthesia) at her ankle to start an IV. Despite saline solution in large amounts, her abdomen continued to visibly enlarge, and we decided we needed to use the limited blood on patients we thought we could save. Her death and the reaction of her child have continued to bother me since.

KCMC built a new emergency department two years ago, and my wife Sue and I helped equip it with a container of donated medical equipment, including stretchers, monitors, resuscitation equipment, ultrasound, and x-ray. They now have regular blood drives. I am confident my patient from several years ago would live if she came today.

Inexpensive Chinese motorcycles (about $600) have now become the bane of orthopedists’ existence in developing countries, with road traffic injury levels reaching epidemic proportions. On almost every corner there are young men with their piki pikis offering a cheap, fast, and convenient taxi service. Anyone purchasing a motorcycle is supposed to go through a training program and get a license, but it is easy to pay someone with a license to buy a motorcycle for you and you are in business. As with the buses, the drivers compete to be the fastest and weave in and out of traffic, drive on the shoulders, and often pass on the wrong side at high speeds. The consequences of this system are many severe accidents. For those that survive and are able to get transported to the hospital (usually from a Good Samaritan), our work begins.

Four to eight of these patients arrive at our ER daily. Our intern, who is one year removed from medical school, is the first to be called. For an open long bone fracture, triage involves immediate IV antibiotics, tetanus vaccine (we get about 3 cases of tetanus per month), and a splint. As soon as possible, we try to get the patient to the operating room to wash out the wound and remove dirt and dead tissue. The orthopedic resident on call will perform this procedure. More senior backup is available if needed.
Before we started the teaching program at KCMC, these patients would generally have a pin inserted through the bone just below the knee for a femur fracture or through the heel for a tibia fracture and be placed in bed on traction for 2-3 months. Understandably, this leads to severe joint stiffness and muscle atrophy, and the bone often heals with deformity or doesn’t heal at all. Luckily, due to our donations of medical equipment, treatment now is quite different. For the more severe tibia and joint injuries, an external fixator can be placed, which involves several pins placed into the bone connected by an external metal frame. This allows people immediate mobilization.

I feel the most important difference we have made is the donation of a SIGN nail set. The Surgical Implant Generation Network (signfracturecare.org) was started by my friend, Dr. Lew Zirkle, several years ago to address the problem of treating long bone fractures in resource-poor settings. At home, these fractures are treated with metal rods placed down the center of the bone using an x-ray machine to guide the rod. SIGN has developed an ingenious rod that can be placed without the use of x-ray. For a one-time donation, a hospital receives two instrument sets and 100 nails. As long as the patient results are reported back to the SIGN database, every nail that is used is forever replaced for free. The hospital in the capital of Tanzania uses about 1,000 nails per year. Hundreds of thousands of these nails have been used around the world. Our motorcyclist patients can now be treated with a state-of-the-art nail at no cost and be up out of bed 1-2 days after the operation, and usually full weight-bearing by six weeks without the morbidity of prolonged bedrest. The main problem now with these patients is getting them to return to the clinic at six weeks when they feel fine.

Last Friday, I visited two of my former residents who are the orthopedists at the government hospital in Arusha, Tanzania. They are very frustrated to need to still use traction as they have no SIGN program. I promised them I would try to raise funds for a SIGN set when I return home. Like most doctors around the world, they want the best available care for their patients.

Glen Crawford, MD, Atlantic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine

A Day in the Life of Dr. Crawford’s Volunteering, Week 1

March 6, 2019
Moshi, Tanzania, East Africa

I am now at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Northern Tanzania. This is my twentieth trip volunteering with Orthopedics Overseas, a group dedicated to teaching orthopedics in less developed countries. My wife, Suzanne, and I came here as medical students in 1985, and were frustrated (as were all the doctors working here) at the difficulty treating needy patients in a resource-poor environment. I started the KCMC teaching program in 2008, and we have had orthopedic surgeons from around North America volunteer here, as well as sponsored doctors from KCMC to come to the United States for specialized training. Sue and I have also sent 7 containers of medical equipment here, the most recent of which arrived the day before we did.

The hospital has around 800 beds and serves as a referral center for 15 million people. It is also a major teaching center, with medical and nursing schools and many postgraduate training programs including the orthopedic residency, which is the main focus of our teaching program. Before starting residency, the physicians have all practiced general medicine for at least three years, and the orthopedics training is four years. When they take their final exams they are expected to be knowledgeable and competent in all aspects of orthopedics. We volunteers especially focus our teaching on aspects of orthopedics the residents may not be exposed to as much while caring for patients here. As an example, I brought an arthroscopy unit here, and we had a teaching session for the residents using cow knees from the market before performing the first arthroscopy in the region on a patient with excellent results. Prior to this they could only read about sports medicine procedures.

Trauma makes up the majority of our work here. As in much of the developing world, road-traffic accident rates are skyrocketing due to the availability of cheap motorcycles, more cars and careless driving. As at home, cell phone use, speeding and alcohol are major contributing factors. Trauma is the leading cause of death and disability ages 20-40. As a referral center, we are sent the most severe cases and there are many compound or open fractures. Last year when I was here for two weeks, we saw three patients with bilateral open femur and tibia fractures (above and below the knee). We now have 80 patients in the hospital. I will relate some of their stories next.

Glen Crawford, MD, Atlantic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine

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Atlantic Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine