Meet Dr. Murtha, The ACL Vet
Dr. Murtha is Chief of Surgery at the Massachusetts Veterinary Surgery Referral Center and The Canine Cruciate Center of New England. Over a career spanning 35 years Dr. Murtha has performed thousands of cruciate surgeries and this year alone he is on pace to do nearly 400 cruciate surgeries. It’s fair to say that likely nobody in New England does more cruciate surgeries than Dr. Murtha. That is why clients and colleagues alike call Dr. Murtha “The ACL Vet”.
Dr. Murtha’s father was a veterinarian and he worked in his father’s practice until he went off to college… so Dr. Murtha grew up having deep roots in the veterinary profession. Prior to becoming a veterinarian, Dr. Murtha worked in research at Harvard Medical School under a number of distinguished veterinarians. These veterinarians served as Dr. Murtha’s mentors. They taught him to think analytically and to think outside the box… and they taught him to find answers and solutions. Dr. Murtha was planning to follow in their footsteps and go into research as a veterinarian, but upon graduating from the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in 1985 he discovered that healing was far more rewarding for him.
In 1987 Dr. Murtha established his own clinical practices and has been performing surgery for 35 years now. Also starting in 1987, Dr. Murtha supervised the welfare and the medical and surgical care of racing greyhounds in the state of Massachusetts as a state-licensed official. Though he did this for ethical reasons, over 24 years this experience provided Dr. Murtha with a wealth of knowledge about canine sports medicine and surgery, and canine orthopedics… and as a surgeon, he draws on and utilizes this knowledge to the advantage of his surgical patients each and every day. From 1995 to 2002 he founded and directed the Healing Hands Foundation for Animals, a nonprofit organization that surgically treated injured racing greyhounds so they could be adopted into homes (watch the throwback news coverage video below!).
