Little Gabrielle, three and a half, sat mutely on the examining table, watching my every move. Her legs dangled over the edge of the paper-covered vinyl, revealing a right knee that protruded about an inch farther than the left.
"You can fix her, can't you, Doctor?" her mother asked anxiously. "She's my dancer."
"Her pediatrician was very concerned," I said, evading the question. In fact, her pediatrician had bypassed the formality of an orthopedic consult and brought the X-rays straight to my office door. Orthopedic surgery is rooted in a long tradition of preventing deformity in children. (Orthopedics comes from two Greek words meaning "straight" and "child.") A crooked tree braced to a post is the emblem of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
I skimmed the meager entries in Gabrielle's chart, trying to figure out how the asymmetry of her ...
