Whitefish native leads research in blast wounds

Dr. Jonathan Forsberg has seen first-hand the toll of war.

In his training to become an orthopaedic oncologist for the Navy, he almost exclusively cared for battle-wounded troops.

“I did my orthopaedic training entirely during war time,” Forsberg said in a recent phone interview with the Pilot. “That was challenging. We saw about 80 percent of combat causalities coming back.”

But from those trying times grew a career passion for caring for patients injured in combat.

Forsberg, 44, now heads up the Regenerative Medicine Department at the Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

He is working with a research team to develop treatments to stop the spread of tumor growth in amputees suffering from blast injuries.

“I enjoy talking to patients, listening and helping improving their quality of life,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about.”

Forsberg suspects his passion for medicine and the military was handed down through family.

He first took an interest in the medical field as a young boy. His father owned a veterinary clinic in Forsyth, and the work struck him as interesting.

“[My father] made sure I was exposed to medicine at an early age — and I was fascinated by it,” Forsberg said. “I looked at medicine as a possible profession early in my childhood.”

His career path began in earnest after graduating from Whitefish High School in 1990. At the encouragement of his family — his father served in the military and his sister was an Air Force Academy graduate — he joined the Marine Corps instead of blindly jumping into a four-year college.

“My parents decided I needed a bit more self-discipline and confidence,” Forsberg recalls of his decision to join the military.

He later applied for and was accepted to the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Rhode Island.

He went on to serve as a general medical officer with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unity in Okinawa, Japan after medical school, and completed an orthopaedic surgery residency at the National Naval Medical Center, followed by a deployment to Iraq as a surgeon. He then completed the orthopaedic oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Ketttering cancer center in New York City.

Forsberg admits his career path was somewhat convoluted, but says he has no regrets about joining the military.

While he still has years left to serve in the Navy, he’s thankful to be without financial debt that buries other doctors fresh out of medical school.

The military also offers a lot of flexibility and opportunity to quickly move up in the ranks of medicine that he wouldn’t see in the private sector, he said.

“You think about the military being a regimented environment, but in medicine we’re not constrained by the number of patients we see. There is no financial incentive to steal patients, so there is a tremendous collaboration. And research doesn’t effect our bottom line, so I’m able to do more of that.”

He currently spends about half his time in the research lab studying heterotopic ossification — bone growth in soft tissue that can happen following a blast injury or other extensive wound.

“The immune system doesn’t know how to react [to these large wounds] and we see a lot of complications where bone forms in the muscles,” he said.

That is problematic for amputees who require a socket to bare weight, and the end result can be patients bound to a wheelchair.

But through his team’s research, they are beginning to understand how to prevent and treat such issues, and ultimately improve the lives of patients with amputations.

“We’ve spent a lot of time and effort in the lab modeling that process,” he said.

Forsberg’s team is developing a new prosthetic that attaches directly to bone, which he hopes will be useful for patients with amputations complicated by wound failure or heterotopic ossification.

He also splits his time between Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health. He says he especially enjoys working at the NIH because he sees difficult cases that can’t be treated anywhere else and it provides him the opportunity to work with other leading experts across multiple specialties.

Outside of the hospital Forsberg and his wife compete in a weekly regatta at the Annapolis Yacht Club. He picked up on sailing while at the Naval Academy and now sails in distance races or bouey races.

He says sailing in Maryland is akin to skiing in Whitefish.

“You can’t live in Annapolis and not know someone who sails,” he said.

Still, he gets back to Whitefish to visit family and get on the slopes whenever he can carve out the time.

“Every time I get back I think how beautiful it is there,” he said.