Bill-on-the-Hill

First, the Web Site du Jour: http://www.taosortho.com, and if you're wondering what an orthopedic clinic has to do with travel, read on.

People who've never been to New Mexico tend to expect the state to be the kind of desert you see in a Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and to be sure, parts of it are. However, North Central New Mexico is mountainous enough to get very non-desertish precipitation, notably snow in the winter. And we have had a real honker of a winter for snow this year. That's good from the standpoint of skiing, which can be fabulous in this region if there's enough snow, and also for the ecosystem, which gets badly stressed in drought winters (of which we've had too many recently), creating an unfortunate risk of severe forest fires. However, it's not so good when the snow turns to ice, as it eventually does, and you skid on the ice and screw up a knee, as I eventually did.

Fortunately, it turns out that there is a world-class knee specialist at that clinic referenced above, in the tiny (pop. 7,000 or so) town of Taos. Why a world-class knee guy in such an out-of-the-way place? Well, there are good reasons. For one thing, the Taos Ski Valley is located, surprise surprise, just outside Taos, and if there's one place where you can expect a knee surgeon to get plenty of business, it's at the foot of a ski area that's not only notoriously difficult but also enticing to skiiers whose technical expertise may not be up to the area's requirements. For another, Taos is quite an entertaining little town, with a famous art colony, remarkably rich cultural opportunities, and generally a comfortable if weird ambience that evokes that of better-known Santa Fe, but without as much tourist schlock, not to mention schlocky tourists. The town also values having things like the Taos Orthopaedics Institute around, and I'd suspect their cost of doing business there is such as to make an office in the boonies appealing, although I haven't seen their books to know this for a fact. And of course, the clinic has to be somewhere, so why not Taos?

So I spent the last couple of days in this nice little town, getting tested, imaged, diagnosed, etc., and doing a few tourist things in between trips to various physicians. I stayed at the Hotel Don Fernando de Taos and ate at the Guadalajara Grill (South), both of which you'll find referenced in that English-language Wikitravel article for Taos -- small-town lodging and dining rather than big-city chic, but quite satisfactory for the purpose, and after all, the goal of the trip was rehabilitation, rather than hedonism. On that count, I'm happy to say that the verdict was that my dinged-up knee does not require surgery -- yet. So the outcome was really quite satisfactory, although I didn't sleep all that well, for reasons pertaining to a sore knee and my general sleep difficulties rather than any deficiency in this little motor hotel.

I can't help but wonder if things like this medical practice are a harbinger of significant social change. It wasn't all that long ago that if you wanted to get world-class medical care, you'd probably better go to a substantial city to get it, or at least to a known outlier (e.g. Mayo Clinic) that the big-city doc sends you to or that's associated with a major university. There were good reasons for that; the cities were where the people were, obviously, and air travel was such that travelers to the clinic from outside the area would be at a gross disadvantage in getting there unless there was a major airport (implying major city) nearby. But with the vast improvements in airline availability over the last 30 years or so, it's no longer necessary for a first-rate clinic to be situated close to a major airport that way, so that the MDs can set up their practice where they want it, and still have reasonable expectations of drawing crowds if they're good. That, in my opinion, is a Good Thing, and we may start to see more of this kind of professional dispersal in the future. (Or not.)