World
Champion.Patient.Physician.
Melissa Buhl is now Dr. Melissa Burman, MD — a former world-champion mountain biker practicing evidence-based sports medicine for active adults.
Most injured active adults are offered only two extremes.
Ice, anti-inflammatories, wait and see. Fine for some things — but for an athlete it often means deconditioning and a problem that never truly resolves.
Precise diagnosis with ultrasound, guided procedures and orthobiologics, smart load management, and specific rehab — matched to what the evidence actually supports.
Sometimes necessary — but a major step with long recovery. Too often it’s offered as the only alternative to doing nothing at all.
The Story
Gravity, at the very top.
Racing as Melissa Buhl, I spent a decade at the sport’s highest level — national titles and a world championship in gravity mountain biking. Reading a course, managing risk, recovering between rounds: it was a physical education most physicians never get.
Then the body said stop.
A torn ACL, then chronic low-back pain. For the first time I was the patient — handed the same blunt choice so many active people get: rest indefinitely, or go straight to surgery. Neither answer fit an athlete who wasn’t ready to stop.
I tried what I now prescribe.
I pursued guided, evidence-based care as a patient — orthobiologics, load management, and a recovery plan built around me — and felt firsthand the gap between “rest it” and the operating room. That experience is the reason this practice exists.
Now I sit on the other side.
Internal medicine and sports medicine training, sharpened by everything the racing and the recovery taught me. Evidence over hype, movement as medicine, and a plan built for getting back to the thing you love.
“You get the same advice I’d give myself,
my family, or a teammate.”
That experience is how I practice.
The Path Forward Framework — five steps that put the procedure in its place. It’s never the destination, only one tool on the way back to sport.
Orthobiologics is the umbrella term for treatments that use your body’s own healing materials to help an injury recover. PRP — platelet-rich plasma, concentrated from a small sample of your blood — is one kind of orthobiologic, not a separate therapy. Which option fits depends on your diagnosis and what the evidence supports; we decide that together.
Understanding Orthobiologics & PRP
What they are, what the evidence actually says by condition, what they cost, and who they’re not for. The first of a growing library written to inform, not to sell.