Healthy You: United Regional Center for Advanced Orthopedics

 According to the CDC, falls are the leading cause of injuries among adults 65 years or older, with one in four falling annually. Officials with United Regional’s Center for Advanced Orthopedics talked about the steps you can take to ensure you’re able to take steps in the future.

Orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Michael Sheen, sees multiple patients on a daily basis, many of whom are elderly patients who have suffered from serious falls.

“Falls create all kinds of injuries, but particularly lower extremity, which are the most disabling fractures of the hip, fractures around the knee or fractures around the ankle,” said Dr. Sheen. “You think about how many steps you have to take each day or how mobile you have to be. That’s your lower extremities for sure.”

Falls that can be very debilitating to the victim.

“For example, if you break your hip and it has to be fixed, you’ve got to get through healing for about 6 to 8 weeks, then you’ve got to start the recovery process,” said Dr. Sheen. “So I tell patients now it’s going to be four, maybe six months before you get back to where you were.”

But as you can imagine, those aren’t the only injuries they see from falls.

Dr. Alan Coleman, a surgeon at United Regional Health Care System, has seen his fair share of severe injuries from falls in the emergency room.

“The head injuries are probably the most significant, or can be just because a majority of our patients do have blood thinners to some type, whether antiplatelet therapy or just anticoagulants in general,” said Dr. Coleman. “Because of heart disease and history of arrhythmias and things like that, but they lead to significant head bleeds.”

According to Laura Pressler, a Trauma Education and Injury Prevention Coordinator, 71 percent of URHCS’s trauma activations in 2025 were fall-related. Pressler said there are ways to educate the public about trauma and injury prevention, such as fall-prevention classes.

“We’ve had dozens of classes and well over 1000 people [have] taken those classes,” said Pressler. “We teach things like balance, strengthening exercises, things I can do at home. [We] also encourage them to be out and be active and stay active from a younger age to prevent falls as they get older.”

Classes like these help raise awareness on fall prevention while lowering the number of fall-related injuries annually.

United Regional is also inviting the community to “Generations United” on April 19th, at the Bill Bartley YMCA, located at 5001 Bartley Dr., a free event focused on staying active, connected, and preventing falls at every age.