Meet Dr. Petrie

BOTH SIDES OF THE EXAM ROOM

Medicine was part of Russell Petrie’s world long before it became his profession. He comes from a multigenerational family of physicians, and at seven years old was already accompanying his father on post-surgical rounds at the Mayo Clinic. Years later, he would return to Mayo for medical school and his orthopedic surgery residency.

But some of his most formative education in sports medicine happened outside the classroom.

As an athlete, repeated injuries put him on the other side of the exam room. He learned what it meant to recover, to lose time from a sport, and to depend on a physician who understood not only the injury, but what the patient was trying to get back to.

That experience still shapes the way he practices today. Treating an athlete well requires more than understanding anatomy. It means understanding the sport, the position, the physical demands, and the individual goals of the person in front of you. The objective is not simply to repair an injury. It is to understand what recovery needs to make possible.

That combination of clinical rigor and lived perspective has guided a career built first and foremost around caring for patients, and later expanded into healthcare leadership, innovation, sustainability, and work beyond medicine.