The Cutting Edge
health care, hospitals, orthopedics, technology,
In Cheyenne, the Reckling name is closely associated with medicine.
Today, Dr. W. Carlton Reckling, an orthopedic surgeon whose specialties include spine surgery and computer-aided total hip and knee replacement, continues as a third-generation Wyoming physician. Reckling’s grandfather, a general practitioner, came here in the 1930s. His father, Walter E. Reckling, practiced general surgery in Cheyenne from 1965-99.
“I really am a Wyoming guy,” Reckling says. “Cheyenne is my home.”
Initially, Reckling wanted to be an engineer and even completed his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Northwestern in Chicago. But, by the end of his college career, he had decided the mechanics of the body interested him more. He chose to pursue a career as an orthopedic surgeon, an interest stirred by his uncle Fred Reckling, a professor in orthopedics at the University of Kansas.
“Orthopedics has always been around me,” Reckling says. “Plus, there is a lot of engineering in orthopedics. It is part mechanics and part biology.”
After attending medical school at Creighton in Nebraska, Reckling did his residency in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota. One of his residency mentors recommended Reckling complete a fellowship at The Center for Spinal Surgery & Study in England.
“In England, there aren’t as many orthopedic specialty centers,” Reckling says. “So the volume is higher and the severity and variety of the cases I got exposed to were much, much greater than it would have been had I done my fellowship at conventional specialty center in the U.S.”
Armed with a wealth of knowledge and experience, Reckling returned to Cheyenne in 1996 to fill the need for orthopedic care in the area. He is the founder of The Spine Center and
The Center for Hip and Knee Replacement. The Spine Center provides comprehensive spinal care. People come from all over the region for both surgical and nonsurgical spine treatment.
Twenty-five percent of Reckling’s practice is computer-assisted hip and knee replacement.
“I am pretty old-fashioned in terms of taking more time to deal with the patients. I am willing to take the time to find out where the pain is coming from,” Reckling says. “On the other side of the process, however, I am willing to push the envelope a little bit by embracing and utilizing new technologies.”
As a result of that high-touch and high-tech focus, Reckling works on some of the challenging orthopedic cases that many other spinal surgeons are unwilling to do. In fact, Reckling’s resume has a number of “firsts” in terms of orthopedic procedures in Wyoming. Some include lumbar disc replacement, computer-assisted hip and knee replacement and the innovative lateral fusion procedure known as XLIF. Reckling continues to perform those and other advanced procedures today.
Story by Brandon Lowe
