Orthopedic Care in Silver Spring, Maryland

Silver Spring is the most urban and most demographically diverse of the Montgomery County communities Maryland Orthopedic Specialists serves. The downtown core along Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue, the established neighborhoods of Woodside, Sligo Park Hills, and Forest Glen, and the broader stretch out to Four Corners and Wheaton, together represent a community with a wider range of ages, occupations, languages, and athletic cultures than almost anywhere else in the county. We see patients from Silver Spring whose orthopedic needs span the full spectrum: high school athletes from Montgomery Blair and Northwood; recreational runners on the Sligo Creek and Northwest Branch trails; adult workers with occupational shoulder, back, and hand injuries; older patients managing knee and hip osteoarthritis; and weekend-warrior athletes balancing demanding work and family schedules with a serious training plan.

Maryland Orthopedic Specialists is approximately fifteen minutes from most of Silver Spring. Our Bethesda office at 6710-A Rockledge Drive is the surgical home — accessible via the Beltway (I-495) to Old Georgetown Road, or via East-West Highway through Chevy Chase and Bethesda. The Bethesda office offers physician consultations, on-site X-ray and ultrasound, PRP and biologic injections, casting, durable medical equipment, and image-guided procedure work. For post-operative and sports rehabilitation, our Rockville physical therapy facility at 1071 Seven Locks Road is roughly twenty minutes northwest. The two locations operate as one care team, with the same surgeons setting the rehabilitation plan that the Rockville therapists carry out.

The injury mix from Silver Spring tilts toward two categories: occupational and degenerative. We see a substantial number of adult patients with rotator cuff disease, lumbar spine pathology, and knee osteoarthritis — conditions that have built up over years of work, family responsibility, and limited time for prevention. Many of these patients arrive after months or years of self-management because finding time for an orthopedic consultation has been the bottleneck. We try hard to remove that bottleneck. Office hours are 7 AM to 7 PM Monday through Friday at the Bethesda location, accommodating early-morning and after-work visits. Same-day and next-day appointment slots are held for acute injuries. We work with patients to schedule imaging, follow-up, and physical therapy in ways that fit their work schedules, including telehealth follow-up where clinically appropriate.

The student-athlete population from Montgomery Blair, Northwood, and the surrounding middle schools rounds out the Silver Spring caseload. We see the full range of growing-athlete injuries — ACL tears, meniscus tears, shoulder dislocations, ankle sprains, growth-plate fractures, Little League shoulder and elbow — and coordinate with school athletic trainers when injuries occur on the field. The running community along the Sligo Creek Trail and the Northwest Branch Trail produces a steady volume of overuse injuries: IT band syndrome, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinopathy, runner's knee, and stress reactions. Most of these resolve with appropriate non-operative management when caught early.

Our sports medicine team — Dr. Christopher Raffo, Dr. John Christoforetti, and Dr. James Gardiner — together handles shoulder, knee, and general sports medicine cases from Silver Spring. Dr. Gardiner brings more than 30 years of practice experience. Common surgical procedures for patients from this area include rotator cuff repair (with or without biologic augmentation like Regeneten), ACL reconstruction, meniscus repair, and arthroscopic shoulder stabilization with labral repair for shoulder instability and SLAP/Bankart labral tears. Dr. Christoforetti handles all hip preservation work, including arthroscopic labral repair and FAI correction. Dr. Peter Fitzgibbons offers fellowship-trained hand, wrist, and upper-extremity care — important for the substantial occupational hand-injury population we see from this community. Dr. Gary Feldman handles foot and ankle problems, including plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinopathy, bunions, ankle instability, and diabetic foot complications.

We are in-network with the major commercial plans Silver Spring residents typically carry, including Aetna, BlueCross BlueShield, Cigna, United Healthcare, and the Maryland and federal exchange plans. We accept Medicare and most Medicare Advantage plans. If you have an unfamiliar plan or want to verify benefits before booking, call (301) 515-0900 and our front-desk team will confirm coverage.

If you live in Silver Spring and an injury or chronic problem has been waiting on a "when I have time" appointment for months — let this be the time.