AEK: Araujo in the hands of the doctor who saves careers!

“With my best doctor. I want to thank once again for everything Dr. Pedro Ripol and the hospital “Ruber International”».

With a post of 23 words and a photo with his daughter, Mr Sergio Araujo he came out last Friday (21/4) from the surgery smiling and confident that this adventure has passed. The 31-year-old captain of AEK can once again set goals for his career, knowing that science has done its job.

However, the 70-year-old Spanish traumatologist, P. Ripol, is not just a doctor who will perform an ordinary operation on a football player. The Argentinian Union striker, from his time at Spanish side Las Palmas, had his professional future in his hands when he suffered a serious injury to the ligament and cartilage in his left ankle. With all due respect to the leading orthopedic surgeon and former glory of AEK, Laki Nikolaou, who is the head of the PAE medical team, he made it clear right from the start that “I have my doctor”.

But who is Dr Pedro Luis Ripoll, blindly trusted by the biggest stars of world football, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Xavi Alonso, James Rodriguez, Pepe, Marcelo, Frankie de Jong, Raul Albiol, when will their misfortune knock on the “door” inside the playing fields?

He is a doctor without a driver’s license, not because he doesn’t like cars, but because from 9am Monday to 7pm Saturday he can be found operating in Murcia, Madrid, Almería or Alicante. “I think I would constantly cause disasters because before every operation I only think about my patients. So, I prefer to get around Spain by taxi. Their drivers have become my best friends…”, says the – considered by many – leading and most innovative orthopedic surgeon in the world with a smile.

Together with another orthopedic surgeon, Mariano De Prado, they have founded the sports medicine center “Ripolly De Prado”, with five clinics throughout Spain, which since 2013 have been certified by FIFA and are considered the best in the world in the treatment of sports injuries.

But above all, he is a distinguished scientist who, after 42 years of practicing medicine, still faithfully observes the Hippocratic Oath. A “soldier” of Medicine, for whom going to the surgery is a rite of passage.

“I never go out the night before an operation because I want to do the operations in the morning. I usually eat pasta, early afternoon, drink a bottle of protein and sleep in good temperature conditions and, above all, no noise. When I get in the taxi on the way to the surgery I always think that I have a great team and I’m going to act like it’s the last time in my life. How should I do my best, because this is a battle of myself with my limits. This is my mental warm-up,” he says.

His stats are staggering. He has performed thousands of operations, achieving improvement in nine out of ten patients suffering from knee and ankle injuries. The distinguished professor of Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology, refers to his dedication to patients as “servitude”.

Every day he makes dozens of phone calls and texts to his patients to find out how their recovery is going. This is his own medicine, and he confesses: “I think I was born a doctor.”

The first operation at the age of 12

In Jumila, his place of origin, he accompanied his grandfather, Dr. Antonio José, carrying his bag to medical visits, while at the age of 12 he helped his father, Don Salvador, by passing material to his patient’s knee surgery.

“From my grandfather and my father, I believe I inherited their honesty and humility towards the sick,” he says, admitting that he was stigmatized, but at the same time, the loss of his beloved sister, Lolita, showed him the path to medicine. The fact that he follows his rules reverently is due to the fact that he entered a Jesuit school in Valencia at the age of nine and left it at the age of 17.

“The Jesuits gave me a very comprehensive, competitive and open education because we had access to everything that was censored in the Franco era. They taught us to have a good oratory and to be disciplined. Every day we had to get up at 6.30 in the morning.” Upon leaving school he enrolled in the Medical School of the University of Murcia, where his classmates nicknamed him “El Gordo” (the fat one).

“I was a great athlete, but I gained twenty pounds because my studies stopped me from practicing shot put and soccer, which were my favorite sports,” he admits.

He then studied at the Complutense University of Madrid, specializing in Molecular Biology, completing his education in the USA and Switzerland. He has worked in various institutions, such as the CSIC and the Center for Molecular Biology of the Autonomous University of Madrid, he was a member of Developmental Genetics at the School of Madrid, while he was general director of Scientific and Technical Research.

In 1989 he received his first international award, the Videomed Award, for his innovative surgical techniques in the cruciate ligament. Subsequently, the first meniscus transplant in the history of Spain, in 2001, in a patient from Almeria, made a sensation.

In August 2006, together with Mariano de Prado and Javier Vaquero, he achieved another milestone, after becoming the first doctors worldwide to treat necrosis of the femoral head with adult stem cells. This minimally invasive technique in musculoskeletal surgery earned Ripoll the Fundacion Mapfre “Development of Applied Traumatology” prize, awarded to him by Queen Sofia in 2008.

He served the public health system, but at the age of 36 he resigned “because I had to see a hundred patients in two hours”.

Always committed to innovation from the beginning of his career, to avoid the bureaucracy of the State he paid out of his own pocket for a hundred kilo arthroscopic machine and traveled loaded with it on the train that made the route Murcia-Madrid!

In the late 1970s and early 1980s he began appearing as a traumatologist, following the successful meniscal arthroscopy he performed on Cartagena’s Alejandro Sagardui and Real Murcia’s Juanjo.

Ripoll’s altruistic tendencies have never left him as, through the Amical foundation, he deals with cases of people who cannot afford it. Three years ago, Ripoll and De Prado SportClinic made an agreement with the insurance company AXA for contracts for amateur and semi-professional athletes, where for 45 euros a month they can be monitored by a medical team that also monitors La Liga players every week .

The cartilage challenge and ‘Go5D’

The knee cartilage is another challenge for him. “It is a tissue that does not regenerate and we are still struggling. It’s an unsolved problem. In the area of ​​articular cartilage, I try to reproduce a tissue similar to the original,” he told “El Espanol”.

His latest technique is “Go5D”, which works as an electrocardiogram of joints, having created four biomechanics laboratories. “It allows us to precisely measure knee and ankle instabilities, as well as foot structure and axis deviations of the human body. This way we get information that is compared with 4.5 million mobile device data found in big data. With this information, which is completely objective and reliable, we can create a strategy with the patient. This is a medical revolution, because until now clinical data was based only on the experience of the doctor. Now we have something that completes it, reducing the subjective interpretation of radiological examinations”, he had said during the presentation of the technique.

The first athlete it was applied to was former NBA ace Pau Gasol in May 2019, who underwent surgery on his left leg following a fractured scaphoid bone.

The prediction for Ronaldo

Two years ago, the Spanish professor predicted that Cristiano Ronaldo would be able to play until he was 40 without any problems. And he had justified it, knowing as well as anyone his physique.

“His biological age is far below his current 36 years. I think he can play until he’s 40,” he told Marca. In fact, he mentioned that the Portuguese has become better as the years go by. “He has made a very clever transformation of his physique, his style of play and his movements over the years. In his early years he was very concerned with muscle explosion, strength and speed, and then progressed to a well-trained and well-organized physical model. His personality helped him a lot to grow as a professional. To Cristiano, I would emphasize his desire to win. He is never satisfied and demands a lot from himself. Beyond genetics, the brain is the key to being a champion. That’s the base, and then there’s intelligence, the ability to understand reality, to know that your physical conditions are changing and to be able to adapt and make the most of them.”

He also revealed why injuries have always respected Cristiano: “He is very elastic. I laughed at a goalkeeper who, with the ball trapped, tried to stop Ronaldo with his hand and dislocated his shoulder. That’s his strength,” he said.

Sport has always been a constant in Ripoll’s life, along with his passion for opera. He “devours” books and sports newspapers, while jogging along the banks of the Segura River in Murcia and the Retiro Park in Madrid are his favorite habits. Retirement is not yet on his mind.

“I go to America and see 80-year-old doctors doing great work and then going for a run. It is a revolution, for which Europe still has a taboo. I don’t want to say anything to be misinterpreted, but the people who want to, should continue to work. Doctors, and especially surgeons, would do well to renew our licenses every five years. People should be useful as much as possible to give things back to society. I will do it as much as I can.”

Source: kathimerini.gr