After almost sixteen years into his orthopedic surgery practice at OrthoConnecticut with a specialty in sports medicine, Dr. Angelo Ciminiello still comes to work every day feeling like he has the best job in the world. “I really do,” he enthuses. “Honestly, it’s getting more fun.”
Ciminiello grew up on Long Island in a family of athletes; he and his three siblings all played Division 1 sports at their respective schools. Ciminiello was a star baseball player at Providence College, where he played third base and was captain of the team, leading them to a Big East Championship and the NCAA College World Series Tournament. He went to Thomas Jefferson Medical School intent on becoming a heart surgeon, but the intense demands of that specialty made him rethink, and with his (literal) on-the-ground experience in high-level sports, orthopedic surgery made sense. After his residency at the University of Connecticut Health Center, he spent a fellowship year in Boston working as assistant team physician to the Celtics and with some college teams. He’s been in Ridgefield ever since, taking care of the local population’s knees, shoulders, and bones.
“There are more shoulder and knee injuries in the athletic population,” he says. “I see mostly knee and shoulder injuries. I do a lot of reconstructive procedures, from ligament reconstruction to fractures to rotator cuff repairs to ACL injuries and cartilage transplants, all the way up to partial knee replacements.”
“As a sports medicine surgeon, I’m able to take care of the entire body, because a lot of these athletic injuries will take place in a variety of joints,” he adds. “My practice lends itself to that variety on a daily basis, which is incredibly gratifying.”
Ciminiello also loves the specialty’s constant technological evolution. Thanks to arthroscopic techniques, tiny cameras, robots, and other advances, surgeries that once took hours to do and weeks to recover from are shorter, less invasive, and safer. Staying on top of new tools and techniques requires constant education, says Ciminiello. “You need the skill set to do the less-invasive surgery, to be facile with the newer implants, to be in control of all the new technology,” he explains. “I’m practicing differently this year than I was last year, and profoundly differently than when I came into practice, as well as what I was taught when I was a resident or a fellow. That’s the natural evolution of our craft.”
Stretching is the single most important thing Ciminiello would like to see people do to stave off injury and stay out of his office. Stretching before and after an activity builds tolerance and strength around the bones. “The more flexibility you have in the soft tissues around the joint, the more buffer there is for that joint,” he explains. For those who have developed chronic soreness thanks to hours spent on the Merritt Parkway or behind a desk, Ciminiello suggests dropping your shoulder blades down and rolling your neck from side to side to loosen the muscles. “Believe it or not, getting into that good ergonomic position will mitigate an enormous amount of those postural-related shoulder injuries that really drive a lot of the office visits,” he says.
Will stretching, neck-rolling, and posture checks keep every ache or strain at bay? “It’s impossible to prevent every sort of overuse injury,” he says. “I’m not saying that one exercise is going to undo 40 years of poor posture, but it’s something to start the process. Getting started is always the hardest part for everybody, myself included.”
Yoga is a great addition to your fitness routine in order to avoid injury. “Yoga lends itself to overall flexibility and good posture and building your way towards good joint health,” he says. “More men should be doing it,” Ciminiello says to his male patients, especially because they are inherently tighter in the hips and shoulders. His male patients who do yoga are in much better shape orthopedically.
It’s not all about anticipating the challenges of getting older. Ciminiello, who is the team physician for Ridgefield High School, Bethel High School, the collegiate NECBL team Danbury Westerners and the Danbury Hat Tricks, feels strongly that stretching should be routine in every young athlete’s regime. “I look at that as a golden opportunity to really educate those younger patients,” says the former all-star athlete. “The hope is that they’re going to carry that with them for the rest of their life.
