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Personal Injury Orthopedic Specialist

Getting into a car accident can be one of the scariest moments of a person’s life. It doesn’t take a major accident to break bones, dislocate joints, or damage vital soft tissue structures of the musculoskeletal system. Furthermore, the process of filing Personal Injury Protection (PIP) benefits with an automobile insurance carrier, whether it is yours or the other party’s policy, can be frustrating. This only serves to make a bad situation worse, adding confusion and annoyance from the process to pain and uncertainty from the injury. At Nilssen Orthopedics, we go above and beyond for patients who have been involved in accidents—motor vehicle or otherwise—to ensure all of their orthopedic needs are met in a timely manner. Dr. Nilssen specializes in diagnosing and treating orthopedic injuries following an accident, with the ultimate goal of maximizing quality of life and getting patients back to their pre-accident levels of health and activity as quickly as possible.

When to Seek Medical Treatment

While someone involved in an accident may seem fine in the immediate aftermath, the surge of adrenaline generated by the body during and immediately after a crash can cover up serious but invisible injuries. These hidden injuries can go on to rear their ugly head in the days or weeks following the accident, and, if left untreated, they can lead to years of pain and suffering. Therefore, it is very important to seek out the appropriate level of medical care immediately following an accident to ensure you maximize your chances of quick and complete recovery.

In addition to the clinical implications of waiting, there are also financial considerations to take into account when deciding when and where to seek treatment following an accident. In order to qualify for Personal Injury Protection (PIP) benefits, which is the primary source of funding for injuries stemming from an accident, you have to see an approved physician within 14 days of an accident. Waiting to seek medical treatment can therefore make your injury worse /and/ harm you and your family financially.

Injuries We Treat at Nilssen Orthopedics

The extent of Dr. Nilssen’s medical training makes him uniquely qualified to provide post-accident orthopedic care. As a dual fellowship-trained orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Nilssen can provide competent orthopedic care across the entire musculoskeletal system. Specifically, he treats:

  • Fractures in the foot and ankle, knee, arm, elbow, shoulder, and collarbone;
  • Soft tissue injuries, including tendon and ligament tears, damage to muscle and connective tissue, and other sprains and strains;
  • Injuries to the nervous system causing numbness, tingling, or neuropathy; and
  • Neck and back injuries, including whiplash and disc damage.

Dr. Nilssen treats injuries resulting from a variety of accidents, including automobile and motorcycle accidents, falls, and work-site injuries. However you’ve been injured, Nilssen Orthopedics is uniquely positioned to accurately diagnose your injury and develop a treatment plan designed to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible.

Available Treatments

At Nilssen Orthopedics, our primary goal is to diagnose the source of your pain quickly and efficiently. To that end, at your first visit, Dr. Nilssen and his staff will speak with you to understand your accident and how your body was impacted, conduct a thorough physical examination, and order all of the necessary diagnostic tests to better understand your injury. Nilssen Orthopedics offers in-house imaging, so if your care team determines you need one of these advanced diagnostic tests, they can be performed during your visit.

Based on your diagnosis, your treatment plan can include anything from rest and physical therapy to surgery. Nilssen Orthopedics is equipped to offer a variety of conservative treatment options like casting, Durable Medical Equipment (DME), and physical therapy as soon as the determination is made that your injury can be treated with a conservative approach. Dr. Nilssen also employs a number of non- and minimally-invasive techniques in an attempt to stave off the need for surgery, which is always our goal. However, should your injury require surgery, rest assured that Dr. Nilssen and his team use cutting-edge surgical techniques to maximize healing and minimize recovery time, including arthroscopy and other minimally-invasive techniques.

The Road to Recovery

If you have been involved in an accident, the first step to healing is choosing the best care team you can find; at Nilssen Orthopedics, we firmly believe that team is us. Our team will work with you to schedule your initial appointment, help you understand how Personal Injury Protection (PIP) benefits work, and lay out what to expect on your road to recovery. While overall treatment and recovery time is unique to each injury, you cannot expect to experience full recovery unless you quickly seek out the best treatment team you can.

So if you’ve been involved in an accident and are in pain, schedule an appointment with us today!

About Dr. Nilssen

Erik Nilssen, MD is a board-certified and dual fellowship-trained orthopaedic surgeon. He is the Director and guiding force behind the Nilssen Orthopedics Ankle and Foot Center in Pensacola, Florida. Dr. Nilssen graduated Cum Laude from Auburn University with a Bachelor of Science. He continued his medical education at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, where he earned a Doctor of Medicine. Following graduation, he completed a residency in Orthopaedic Surgery at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He went on to complete two Fellowships at the American Sports Medicine Institute under the tutelage of Dr. James Andrews: a one year immersion in Sports Medicine followed by a focused Foot and Ankle Fellowship with Drs. John Kirchner and Angus McBryde. Dr. Nilssen’s time at ASMI afforded him the opportunity to hone his surgical expertise in treating disorders of the musculoskeletal system.

Personal Injury

Video Transcription

My name is Erik Nilssen. I’m a board certified orthopedic surgeon, dual fellowship trained in both sports medicine and foot and ankle surgery. I think passion is what drove me into healthcare in the first place and it still sustains my interest as we speak today. If you’re looking at personal injury patients, those that are in car accidents, what’s often misunderstood for these patients if they don’t have healthcare insurance, oftentimes the patient’s car insurance will cover the first $10,000 of their health care.And I’ve noticed over the last five, six years, I’ll see these patients well after they’ve been treated somewhere else, Urgent Cares, ERs, and they just… the funds are taken up and they don’t have the money to be treated. So it puts the patient in a really difficult spot. If you look at healthcare today with cost quality and access, we’re trying to provide really cheap costs, keep the costs really low for the patient, provide the best quality and give everybody access.So it’s an interesting question. When it comes to an injury, let’s say car accidents for example, the typical fender bender, my suggestion is if you’ve been hurt at all, if you have any sprain or strain… because I’ve seen in the past what you deem as a sprain could actually be a stress fracture. So I think if you have any type of pain, or injury, or concern after a car accident, you should seek medical care. For those accidents where it’s just a simple fender bender and you actually have zero pain for a couple of days, maybe you can avoid it. But otherwise I would err on the side of caution.So as a board certified orthopedic surgeon, our training involves, multi specialties of the musculoskeletal system. So for example, in our training we do spine. We spent a good year of our training as a resident in spine. We do a year of total joint replacements involving hips and knees. We do sports medicine for a year. We do pediatric injuries as well for a year. And we also do foot and ankle and hand for a year. So it’s a five year training program. And after that you can go ahead and become practicing physician.I actually sort additional training on top of residency, which is called fellowships. So I did a one year fellowship in sports medicine, which involves an intense focused training of shoulders, elbows, and knees, and also hips. Also sports related injuries in terms of athletes of all different levels. And then on top of that I did another year of focused foot and ankle injuries as well. So with that background, it really gives us the ability to diagnose any musculoskeletal injury in terms of spine injuries, shoulder injuries, elbow, hand, knee, wrist, pelvic injuries, foot and ankle, it doesn’t really matter. We can diagnose it and put you on a proper treatment plan.We break this into two categories. There’s nonsurgical and surgical. So nonsurgical involves things like physical therapy, involves durable medical equipment such as boots and braces, anti-inflammatories. It’s really the nonsurgical modalities which the majority of injuries can be treated in mobilization. And again, the key is to really getting an adequate diagnosis to put you on the right treatment plan. If indeed you have a more serious injury or something that fails, sort of nonsurgical treatment, or someone comes in with an acute fracture that needs to be fixed we also have surgical options and we have the ability to take you to surgery and operate, if you will, on the various different body parts.And again, if it’s something highly specialized in something that we personally are not comfortable with, we have a team of physicians that are really just glorified mechanics. We have the oil guy, the timing belt guy, the tire guy. So we all have sort of a specialty that we really focus on and give you the best quality of care.So in terms of recovery, it really depends on your type of injury, what you’ve had done and whether it was a nonsurgical or surgical injury. If by chance, say you had a fracture, you broke a bone, in general, whether it’s surgical or nonsurgical, bones take eight to 12 weeks to heal. There’s also some recovery in terms of therapy. So it really depends on what your injury is, but it can be as little as two months up to a year, depends on what you’ve had done.Yeah. So for those patients that do not have health insurance, they have the ability to use their personal injury insurance under their car insurance. Now for those patients that have health insurance and have car insurance, I think you can still use your car insurance under that, but you have the ability to use your own health insurance as well. So for those uninsured patients that don’t have health insurance, it’s really, really helpful for them to have that personal injury protection in their car insurance to cover them. It’s why it’s really imperative to see someone early who knows what they’re doing, to use that allocated money very wisely to get them back to where they were before.Our caller phone number, which is (850) 435-4800 ask for Tara, my scheduler, or you can go to our website @www.nilssenorthopedics.com.

Specialized in Diagnosing Injuries in the Following Areas:

  • Foot
  • Ankle
  • Knee
  • Hand
  • Wrist
  • Elbow
  • Shoulder

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