Dr. Sean McMillan’s passion for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine started during his youth when he developed a love of sports and a desire to make it his life’s work. Photo by Al Thompson.

When what you do for a living is a job, the workday can’t get over soon enough. When you have a career, there aren’t enough hours in the day.

To have the energy to see 900 different patients a year, as a doctor, you have to love what you do. When you can treat 60 patients in a single day; your practice is your passion.
Such is the life and the career of Dr. Sean McMillan of South Jersey.

Dr. McMillan is an orthopedic sports medicine specialist, and one of the nation’s few doctors performing reverse total shoulder replacement surgery. He is Fellowship-trained in arthroscopic surgery of the shoulder, hip, and knee.

Dr. McMillan is the Chief of Orthopedics and Director of Orthopedic Sports Medicine at Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County.

Additionally, he is an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at Rowan University- School of Osteopathic Medicine (RU-SOM).

A shorter version of all those credentials might read: Dr. McMillan loves sports and treating people passionately and wanted to make an impact in athletics and treatment from an early age.

“I always wanted to be a doctor, I’ll start there,” Dr. McMillan told the Wire recently. “My mom was sick when I was younger and I liked taking care of her.
“But when I started watching sports, I’ll never forget when Tommy John was pitching for the Yankees when I was growing up. They were always talking about this ‘Tommy John surgery’…and I thought…’how cool is it that you can make someone get back to sports?’ I kind of knew I wasn’t going to play sports, I was a smaller guy. So I said I wanted to do that. I wanted to find a way to make someone throw faster or jump higher, whatever it might be, that’s how I got into it.”

Dr. McMillan grew up in North Jersey (Sayreville High School), but went to medical school at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM – Home of Philadelphia 76ers).

Dr. McMillan said his family was originally from South Jersey and wanted to settle here. That is why Dr. McMillan said he spent a year training for his practice at Rowan University in Glassboro. It was there he realized he really could make an impact on peoples everyday life.

“Once I got to watch my first couple of surgeries as a student I thought this was perfect,” Dr. McMillan said. “These people are getting back to their life. They weren’t sick people, They’re not getting heart transplants. These guys and girls are getting back to playing sports, playing basketball and that’s what I wanted to do.”

Athletes are just part of the people he treats. Mailmen, warehouse workers, construction workers are all active professions who rely on having a healthy body to earn a living.
McMillan said his treatments transfer to all walks of life.

“If you can give someone back the quality of life that they want, it’s all that matters,” said Dr. McMillan, who grew up admiring Don Mattingly, former All Star first baseman for the New York Yankees, and current manager of the Miami Marlins. “If they can walk the Mall again, and they’re happy with that. Whatever they want to do, we can give them back that quality of life.”

After PCOM, he sought dive deeper into sports medicine training and that led him to Massachusetts.

“To do my specialty training, after I got done with medical school, I ended up spending time at the University of Massachusetts,” Dr. McMillan said. “We (doctors from his medical group) worked for the Red Sox,we covered the Red Sox (as team doctors).
“I got to cover their Triple-A team, the Pawtucket Red Sox,” Dr. McMillan continued. “Being around the players and working with then reaffirmed what I wanted to do. It opened a lot of doors for me, meeting people, getting involved with people. Opening those doors led me to be able to cover high school teams down here.”

The 38-year old found his way to the Lourdes Care Center in Cherry Hill and Professional Orthopedics at Burlington.

The high schools he and his staff have become the medical staff for include Florence Township, Bordentown Regional, Northern Burlington, Pemberton and Holy Cross.

Dr. McMillan said he and his staff are usually on the sideline for football, but for most other sports, boys and girls, Dr. McMillan said they have a “walk in policy” every Monday where trainers can bring students in for treatment and finances are never an issue.

Shoulder, hips and knees are the area of the body McMillan deals with the most. He says he wants to treat the athlete or active adult without replacement surgery if at all possible.

“Listen, at the end of the day I’ll replace your joints if you need them.” he said. “But my specialty is to try and prevent you from getting them replaced.”

A popular and effective treatment McMillan provides is known as Platelet-rich plasma (Abbreviation: PRP).

According to its Wikipedia page, “PRP is a blood plasma that has been enriched with platelets. As a concentrated source of autologous platelets, PRP contains several different growth factors and other cytokines that can stimulate healing of bone and soft tissue.”

The doctor explains in more layman’s terms

“At the end of the day, your body wants to heal itself,” McMillan said. “So PRP is when we take your old blood and isolate the healing growth factors that are there and we sort of amplify them. Then we put them in the area that’s injured and it helps that healing happen a whole lot quicker. That is why it’s so great. Back in the day you heard about guys getting shots and going right back in, but that was cortisone. It was effective but it caused damage. PRP is the opposite. PRP helps cause healing. That is why it is so effective.”

McMillan also does do stem cell injections as a means to stop the progression towards joint replacement.

“It works well,” he said. “It helps keep the remaining cartilage cells that are still viable in the knee..,it helps perk them up and regenerate a little bit and take away some of that pain.”
McMillan says a significant amount of his work is minimally invasive. More and more, the surgical community is coming up with better technology to keep from making dramatic and stressful incisions, thus cutting down on possible complications and expense.

Dr. McMillan is part of that effort.

“In a typical day, I’ll see 60 patients,” Dr. McMillan said. “Maybe five or six will be indicated for surgery, meaning the majority were treated without surgery. Whether it’s therapy, injections, medications and that’s a good thing.”

The doctor said this is it. He is doing what he wants to do here in South Jersey.

“We’ve arrived,” said Dr. McMillan, who is a husband and father to four-year-old twins. “This is what we do. We are really busy and we do a lot of really good stuff.”
Dr. McMillan paused, smiled and said as to exclaim he had made his childhood vision come true.
“We get guys back playing sports.”

Here are Dr. McMillan’s locations:
Office visits

Professional Orthopedics at Burlington
2103 Burlington-Mount Holly Road
Burlington Township, New Jersey 08016
***
Lourdes Care at Cherry Hill
1 Brace Road
Cherry Hill, New Jersey 08034
****
Surgery:
Lourdes Hospital at Willingboro
218a Sunset Road
Willingboro, NJ 08046
***
Centennial Surgical Center at Voorhees
502 Centennial Blvd, Voorhees Township, NJ 08043