Paul Norio Morton, MD, FAAOS, FAAHKS

From fire trucks to operating rooms

Dr. Morton was born and raised in Kea‘au, just outside Hilo on Hawai‘i Island, and graduated from Kea‘au High School. College took him 4,000 miles away to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he double-majored in chemistry and biomedical science — and trained as a firefighter on the side.

It was the fire service that revealed the career. As a firefighter and EMT with Miami Township Fire-Rescue, he pulled patients from wrecked cars, worked search-and-rescue calls, and answered medical emergencies at all hours. The adrenaline was part of it; the durable part was the satisfaction of taking care of people on the worst day of their lives. He went looking for a way to do that for a living — and found medicine.

He came home to earn his MD at the University of Hawai‘i’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, spending half of his third-year clinical rotations back on Hawai‘i Island. Even then his training looked outward across the Pacific, with rotations in medicine and surgery at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and in orthopedics at the Hamamatsu School of Medicine in Japan.

Residency in orthopedic surgery took him to St. Luke’s University Health Network in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — including pediatric orthopedic training at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — and in his final year he served as chief orthopedic resident. Then came two fellowships: an ACGME-accredited fellowship in adult hip & knee reconstruction at the University of Chicago, where his mentors taught him robotic joint replacement and how to rescue joint-replacement disasters, and an AO Trauma fellowship at Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe.

Coming home — and building something new

He could have practiced anywhere. He chose home — because his dream was always to bring that training back to the islands, and because patients in Hawai‘i and the Pacific shouldn’t have to fly 2,500 miles for mainland-quality joint care.

To deliver it, he founded Pacific Bone & Joint and PB&J Physical Therapy — bringing surgical care, physical therapy, and imaging under one roof, with clinics in Honolulu (Ala Moana), Kunia (West O‘ahu), Hilo, and Kailua-Kona. From a sports injury to a failed hip or knee replacement no one else will touch, his practice is built to carry patients from first visit to full recovery without leaving the islands. In clinic, patients are cared for by Dr. Morton alongside physician assistant Justin Kapono Grandalen, PA-C, and the PB&J Physical Therapy team — meet your team.