From the start gate
to the exam room.

Racing as Melissa Buhl, I spent more than a decade at the highest level of the sport — internationally from 1998, professionally from 2000 to 2012. Start gates, multiple World Cup podiums, and a wall of national titles: it taught me how bodies actually break, and what it really takes to come back.

The lessons that shaped my medicine started here: movement is non-negotiable, recovery is a skill, and no athlete wants to hear “just stop.”

Racing at that level comes with injuries, and being the patient dropped me into the exact system I now work to fix — offered rest on one side, surgery on the other, and very little in between. The injuries didn’t end my career: in 2012 I retired from racing to go to medical school.

“I’d spent my life reading my own body. Suddenly no one was reading it with me.”

I pursued the guided, evidence-based path back myself — precise diagnosis, smart loading, specific rehab, procedures only where they earned their place. It worked. It also became the blueprint.

Today I practice internal and sports medicine [confirm], sharpened by everything the racing and the recovery taught me. The same advice I’d give myself, my family, a teammate.