About Dr. Dewing

Professional Background

I graduated high school from St. John’s International School in Waterloo, Belgium, where I made friends with students from over fifteen different countries.  My time in Europe gave me both a wonder for the rest of the world and a deep love for my own country.  I went to Harvard College on a Navy ROTC scholarship and discovered the joys and sufferings of rowing.  Crew became a focus that at times overshadowed my coursework, but refined my experience of teamwork, the essentials of maximum individual focus and effort realized only in the synchrony and synergy of coordinated, interdependent movement and drive.  Those experiences on the rivers and lakes of the Eastern states, Regattas in San Diego, Honolulu and even on the River Thames at Henley in England still shape me today.  They inspire my commitment to building teams in clinic and in the operating room that are always hungry to be better, always seeking the best outcomes for my patients.

A career in medicine took shape after I completed a wilderness first aid course at the SOLO school in North Conway, NH in 1993.  I loved studying physiology and anatomy in the great classroom of the outdoors.  I led a number of week-long adventure trips for the Harvard Freshmen Outdoor program.  After a semester as a teaching assistant for one of my college heroes, Dr. Bob Coles, I found my way into medical school at Columbia in NYC.  Those four years in the city were filled with great academic challenge, some of the best friendships of my life, and countless hours training for endurance races, marathons and triathlons.  The hours I spent running and riding the length of Manhattan were the necessary balance to the rigors of med school.  My first clinical rotation was in orthopedics, and my attending, Dr. Jack Henry (in NYC on sabbatical from his job as the team doctor for the Spurs) took me through my first surgical approach for a knee replacement.  A year later, I spent a formative month learning surgery during the day and barn building after work with Dr. Tom Huntsman, a reconstructive surgeon in Cooperstown, NY.  After that, I was hooked on surgery.

My Navy career started in 2000 with a surgery internship at the Navy Hospital in San Diego.  The events that followed were sudden and unpredicted.  I met the love of my life and started working as a Battalion Surgeon for the USMC one month before 9/11.  This resulted in a year of long-distance courtship and deployments to East Asia and Iraq, where my unit was part of the breach and the first four months of combat operations in Baghdad.  Our wedding was postponed by nine months, and two weeks after my return from the desert I started my orthopedic surgery residency in San Diego.  It was not an easy transition!

Many things happened during my four years of residency training.  I found a home in the Catholic Church after many years of soul-searching.  We started a family, which has since grown to five wonderful children, an answered prayer that we shared with each other on our first date!  I discovered a love for sports orthopedic surgery, thanks to some amazing mentors, including Drs. Dana Covey and Matthew Provencher.

We took our first Navy assignment to Guantanamo Bay, where I worked for a year as the sole orthopedist for the base, before departing to Vail, Colorado for my fellowship at the Steadman Hawkins Clinic.  (Out of the frying pan, into the freezer!)  The sports fellowship was one of my most intense learning experiences; and the surgical excellence of my professors set a very high standard which I aspire to each and every day.  We returned to San Diego, where I had the privilege to train residents from the Navy program and from UCSD.  I became the director of sports medicine and the orthopedic consultant to SEAL Teams 3, 5, and 17, as well as the BUDS program.  It was a very intense six years of academic research, a busy surgical practice, and one final deployment to Afghanistan in 2011.  My seven months in the Helmand Valley in support of the Marines, were very difficult, but very rewarding.  We saved many lives, but in doing so we were forced to perform many upper and lower extremity amputations.  Once again, the essentials of team building and team effort from my past became the main effort of my life and work.  After returning, I published a story about our work there in a book called The One I’ll Always Remember, edited by Gary Bloomfield.

We moved to Spokane in 2015, seeking a more peaceful and family-friendly town in which we could settle down for good and raise our five children.  It has proven to be just that.  We have made wonderful friendships, found a great Catholic parish and a vital community of the faithful, and have recently been inspired to help start a classical, Catholic high school downtown.  I have retired from the Navy and have worked with some dedicated people to design and build a sports medicine clinic that integrates surgical care with outstanding non-operative services, physical therapy, team coverage for EWU and the Sounders, and multidisciplinary consultations in nutrition, massage and sports psychology.  We work every day to build a team with a shared vision for excellence, so that every patient that comes to see us feels the benefit of our focus and coordination.  I am honored to be a part of such a fantastic team and to care for so many amazing people!