Doctor knows injuries from playing in NFL

Dr. Stefan Humphries has some experience with rehabilitation medicine, beyond the obvious fact that it’s what he studied in school.

Humphries, who is the new medical director at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute in Spokane, spent five seasons in the NFL and was a guard for the championship Chicago Bears football team of 1985.

“I’ve had enough injuries to have experienced the rehabilitation aspect,” he said.

A torn tricep tendon in his second year with the Denver Broncos ended his professional playing days and launched his career in a new direction.

“I pretty much was on the field one day and in medical school the next,” said Humphries, who has been in Spokane for about a month.

Humphries got a degree in bioengineering from the University of Michigan and was considering medical school when he was first drafted by the Bears. Even in his playing days, he took some classes at a Chicago medical school and volunteered at a children’s hospital.

One of Humphries’ three sisters is also a doctor. “I was kind of following her footsteps,” he said.

Humphries attended medical school at the University of Colorado in Denver and did his residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

He comes to St. Luke’s from Colorado Springs, where he was the medical director at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital.

He said his new job is “similar and it’s not similar.”

At St. Luke’s he will be in charge of putting in place a program of electronic medical record-keeping. He’ll also serve as a liaison between physicians and administration, as well as between the hospital and the community.

He hopes to find time to continue seeing patients, as he did in Colorado.

“That’s kind of what you went to medical school for,” he said.

Humphries said he was sad to see his playing days end.

“It was something that I loved and was very much a time of my life,” he said. “That’s what you miss most, the friends and camaraderie.”

Humphries said he still keeps in touch with his former teammates, albeit infrequently.

“That was a special team,” he says of the Super Bowl Bears “When we get back together, it’s just like yesterday.”

The 1985 Chicago Bears – which included Jim McMahon, Walter Payton and William “The Refrigerator” Perry, among others – became an inescapable part of pop culture that year when the team recorded a song and taped a music video, “The Super Bowl Shuffle.” The song even made the Billboard charts.

If you look closely at the video, you’ll see Humphries playing the drums.

“I’m pretty low-key about it,” he says. But, he admits, “Once you’ve been on a championship team, it’s a pretty special team.”