Dr. Reed grew up in an environment steeped in athletics and chiropractic, with tennis, football and martial arts his sports of choice. From 1983-2004, he was in private practice in Grover Beach, California, specializing in sports chiropractic. He was a team physician at La Habra High School and consultant for women’s gymnastics and track and field at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Reed also served the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue squad as a field training officer, medical quality assurance officer, and commander.

From 2004-2007, Dr. Reed was an Associate Clinical Sciences Professor at the Southern California University of Health Sciences and Director of the Campus Health Center and the Sports Medicine Residency Program. He began full-time work at the USOC in 2007.

You recently returned from the Beijing Olympic Games, where you served the U.S. team as a treating chiropractor and also as the Medical Director of the Performance Services Division of the United States Olympic Committee. What was your typical day like in Beijing?

There really weren’t any typical days until at least the middle of the Games. As employees of the USOC, the other medical director and I had to go out a couple of weeks early. We were stationed at the High Performance Training Center, which was at Beijing Normal University, and we had to get that set up. Our first day involved setting up our sports medicine facility at the university, which consisted of a recovery center (which was massage and chiropractic), a training room and a physician’s office. We worked out of all of them, not just the recovery area.

So we set that up, but then we had to set up everything else. We literally built out the whole track and field venue. We dug out the long jump pits that are a couple of feet deep with sand and sifted all the sand so that it wasn’t all gravelly, horrible sand for our athletes to land in. We were pulling weeds. We helped build out the batting cages, set up the boxing ring. It was that kind of stuff, so there wasn’t a typical day for the first several weeks.

Once the athletes arrived, our days were spent treating athletes. For me, this was from a chiropractic standpoint and a family practice standpoint, because we weren’t just caring for our athletes, we were caring for the USOC. We had about 600 athletes there, but had a full contingent of about a thousand people. So we were caring for our USOC family as well, and quite a few were getting upper respiratory infections and gastrointestinal problems. So between Dr. Reasoner [John Reasoner, MD], who is the other medical director, and myself, we were caring for quite a bit of that.

What are some of the things you were doing once the Games got underway?

Once the Games were underway, it was treating and assessing athletes. I am working very closely with GE [General Electric] Healthcare in doing musculoskeletal ultrasound. We have several studies going on. For instance, we had one of our athletes that pulled a hamstring while they were training. They were getting ready to compete. It was bringing them in, assessing the hamstring with diagnostic ultrasound to determine if they had torn the hamstring, and if they did, to what extent. And then treating that. So there was treatment from that standpoint and there was treatment from a recovery standpoint. The athletes had traveled long distances, so chiropractic was used extensively for travel-related stiffness and soreness. There was a lot of that and a lot of using Graston technique on quite a few of the athletes. Those were typical days.