STELLARTON – A Stellarton native will be honoured this weekend for the strides he’s made in medicine.
Dr. Frank Sim grew up in Stellarton, the son of mine manager Franklin Hindson Sim and his wife Dorothy, and graduated from Stellarton High School. A hockey whiz, Sim was inducted in 2007 into the Pictou County Sports Heritage Hall of Fame for his efforts in leading the Stellarton High Hockey team to victory as 1956-1957 Provincial A Champions.
Sim went on to play for the Dalhousie University team while studying medicine and eventually had to make a choice between a potential career in the NHL or as a physician.
Happily for his patients, Sim chose medicine and graduated in 1964. Sim completed his internship, followed by a year of internal medicine, when he met Dr. Mark Conventry at the Mayo Clinic. It was Conventry who convinced Sim to change his career path to orthopedic surgery.
“Orthopedics was natural because of all the sports I played,” Sim explained in an interview from Minnesota on Wednesday. “When I was training, there was a lot of innovation and promise in the musculoskeletal tumour surgery field and there was the opportunity to pioneer a lot of procedures.”
Sim became something of a trailblazer in the medical field, particularly in musculoskeletal oncology, where he was a leading proponent of sparing limbs in patients with bone and soft tissue tumours in the 1970s. He was the founding member of the Musculoskeletal Tumour Society and has been active in the International Society of Limb Salvage and International Skeletal Society. He’s written several publications and has toured the world.
Over the past 40 years, Sim has trained hundreds of residents and more than 50 orthopedic oncology fellows at the Mayo Clinic. His students will be among those honouring him Friday and Saturday at a banquet held in his honour in Rochester, Minn., as part of a scientific conference.
“It’s kind of a big deal,” Sim admits with a chuckle. “All the people I’ve trained over the years will be there.”
A total of 18 countries will be represented at the gala. These former students are now heads of programs around the world and are training other young doctors in the field.
But the event isn’t a close to Sim’s much-decorated career. Now 70 years old, Sim is still practising and plans to keep going for years to come.
“This is not a retirement,” he said. “It’s a late career celebration.”
Sim has passed his love of medicine on – his daughter is a psychologist with the Mayo Clinic and he enjoys spending time with his grandchildren.
