“We treat our patients like our family, providing personalized conservative care to everyone.”

“In the hand it’s a real marriage of form and function,” he says. “Our job is to take bones and tendons and ligaments and nerves and blood vessels and in some cases the skin and the coverage that’s required to get wounds to heal and apply that to the hand.”

After receiving his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Merrick completed his surgery internship, general surgery residency, and an integrated plastic surgery training program at the University of Kentucky. During that time, he grew interested in operating on hands and completed a hand-surgery fellowship at The Kleinert Institute in Louisville, Kentucky.

“It’s amazing to see these people afterwards,” he says. “They feel like they’re part of society again, and that too is super gratifying.”

In addition, Merrick’s cosmetic surgery practice encompasses breast augmentations and reductions, face and brow lifts, rhinoplasty, tummy tucks, and much more. In addition to these surgical approaches, Dr. Merrick’s office is also staffed by aestheticians, who provide services such as clinical facials, and injectionists, who offer Botox and other injectables and fillers. All these treatments can help patients gain and maintain healthy, beautiful skin.

And in partnership with a local orthopedist, Dr. Austin Crow, Dr. Merrick is the western Wisconsin pioneer of a new treatment called adipose-derived stem cell therapy, in which components of a patient’s abdominal fat and blood are injected into joints, a process that can improve arthritic pain and delay the need for joint-replacement surgery.

Amid such innovative, 21st-century procedures, Dr. Merrick also provides the personalized bedside manner of an earlier era.

“That’s one of the areas that we really excel in,” he says. “My practice is committed to providing a truly old-school approach to medicine. Literally everybody who comes in feels like they’re a part of our family. Every one of my patients has my cellphone number.” Dr. Merrick adds that this provides a “distinctly different experience” than going to a big medical network where patients may be treated as numbers, not individuals.

“We want them to feel comfortable,” he continues. “We want them to leave with no questions unasked.”

Earlier this year, Dr. Merrick’s clinic relocated to a newly remodeled space on Oakridge Drive. The new clinic offers a more extensive operating room, allowing him to provide more procedures in-house.

But Dr. Merrick emphasizes surgery isn’t always the best option. “Our No. 1 goal is to avoid surgery when we can,” he says. He will pursue conservative approaches first, rather than pushing patients toward more invasive – and costly – treatments.

“We focus on doing the right thing medically regardless of the effect on the business,” he says.