 Alumni
Interviews:
Lawrence Dorr, M.D.
2006 Distinguished Alumnus
As a medical student at The University of Iowa, Lawrence Dorr
thought he might become a heart surgeon. “I wanted to be
the next deBakey,” Dorr said recently. An internship and
residency at Los Angeles County Hospital turned him to orthopaedics
instead, and a fellowship at New York City’s Hospital for
Special Surgery gave him the final push to sub-specialize in joint
replacement.
Now he’s an internationally recognized authority in that
field, teaching, lecturing, publishing and treating patients. Total
joint replacement, Dorr said, is “tremendously effective
in getting people back to being mobile, productive and not in pain.”
Dorr,
who practices in and around Inglewood, Calif., is medical director
of the Arthritis Institute at Centinela Freeman Regional
Medical Center and of the Dorr Institute for Arthritis Research
and Education Foundation. He also holds a clinical faculty appointment
at the University of Southern California. Based on his research and on experience performing thousands of
knee- and hip-replacement procedures, Dorr has helped design the
artificial joints used by many doctors and hospitals.
Outside the medical profession, Dorr may be best known as the founder
of Operation Walk, which sends teams of physicians, nurses and
physical therapists to medically underserved countries to provide
joint replacements and to train local surgeons. The organization’s
success helped earn Dorr the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ Humanitarian
of the Year award in 2005.
Dorr credits his Iowa upbringing and
education for much of his success. The state’s renowned work
ethic and sense of community shaped his outlook, he said, while
Des Moines public schools and
Mount Vernon’s Cornell College - where he founded Dimensions,
a pre-medicine program to prepare students to practice both the
art and science of healing - gave him a foundation for continued
learning. He’s particularly proud of his medical education
at Iowa and of the master’s degree he earned in pharmacology,
which taught him the fundamentals of scientific research.
Also instrumental
is his wife, Marilyn Dorr, who has provided the support he needed
to pursue his career. “She understood the
amount of work it took to be successful,” Dorr noted. |
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