Dr. Jacques Courseault, MD, CAQSM, FAAPMR · Research · Media · Clinical Innovation

Team physician. Published researcher. Fascia pioneer.

Few physicians anywhere work at the intersection of sports medicine, fascia, and hypermobility — and fewer still have built the published research, the invented procedures, the dedicated clinic, and the press record to show for it. This page is that record: every publication, every broadcast, every innovation, with links.

Board-certified, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation · CAQ Sports Medicine · Assistant Professor, Tulane University School of Medicine · Founder, The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center®

Featured & Published In

NPR Louisiana (WWNO)
WWL-TV New Orleans
SciTechDaily
Current Sports Medicine Reports (ACSM)
Heliyon (Cell Press)
ACR Open Rheumatology
Lateral Think Podcast (Australia)

Sports medicine taught Dr. Courseault how tissue behaves under load. Fascia is the tissue medicine forgot to examine. And hypermobility is what happens when that tissue is built differently from birth. Most physicians treat these as three unrelated subjects. Dr. Courseault’s career is the argument — made in journals, on the air, and in clinic — that they are one subject.

Trained at Tulane University School of Medicine and board-certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation with a Certificate of Added Qualification in Sports Medicine, he spent years on Louisiana sidelines before founding The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center® — and before publishing the research that gave fascia and hypermobility medicine some of its first hard footholds. What follows is the evidence, organized so you can check every claim yourself.

Dr. Jacques Courseault examines a patient at The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center® — the hands-on evaluation behind every diagnosis on this page.

Pillar One · Sports Medicine

Earned on the sideline, not claimed from a desk.

Dr. Courseault’s sports medicine career did not begin in an exam room. It began on the training-room floor — as an athletic trainer for Tulane, trained at Georgia Tech, and as a personal trainer before medicine. That ground-level fluency in how athletes actually train, tape, load, and recover still shapes how he practices as a physician.

Over his career he has served as a team physician for LSU, Tulane, Southern, and Loyola, along with numerous Louisiana high schools — and his event medicine runs to the sport’s biggest stages: physician coverage for the Allstate Sugar Bowl since 2018, team physician for the Cotton Bowl, team physician for Major League Rugby’s NOLA Gold — where he also advised the league on its player-safety protocols — medical director of the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon New Orleans, and physician coverage for the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. Today he consults for multiple NFL teams and treats current and former professional athletes from across the country at The Fascia Institute.

At Tulane, he performed orthopedic evaluations for former NFL players in the NFL Trust clinic — and the same skill set has served those who served: in Tulane’s Brain Health Program, he treated veterans living with chronic traumatic brain injury using occipital nerve blocks.

That pedigree shows up in the athletes who seek him out. WNBA champion Theresa Plaisance. NFL linebacker DeMario Davis, through the FIT ELITE Performance Group program. Professional pitcher Eric Reyzelman, who returned to high-level pitching after Hydrofascia Release™ and metabolic optimization. NFL quarterback Jameis Winston, who underwent Fascial Mapping® at the Institute in New Orleans. And the published record matches: case reports on a chronic hamstring injury in an NFL running back, a college football player returned to play, and a 2024 Hydrofascia Release™ session with Shaquille O’Neal for neck mobility.

When WWL-TV’s veteran health reporter Meg Farris profiled the injection technique keeping athletes in competition, the physician she sat down with was Dr. Courseault — the story is in the media section below.

Pillar Two · Fascia

He published on fascial hydrodissection before most clinics had heard the word.

In 2019, Dr. Courseault and colleagues published the first paper describing fascial hydrodissection for chronic hamstring injury in Current Sports Medicine Reports — the American College of Sports Medicine’s official clinical review journal. That paper put a then-obscure, ultrasound-guided fascial technique into the sports medicine literature years before “fascia” became a buzzword.

He then did what few authors do: he built the clinical infrastructure to match the paper. He developed Hydrofascia Release™ (HFR-A and HFR-P), created the Fascial Mapping® head-to-toe ultrasound assessment performed nowhere else, and published an open case library — eight clinical reports spanning hamstrings, scapular pain, post-surgical knee stiffness, low back pain, and even a wasp-sting fascial injury — all linked in the research library below. When Tulane announced his hypermobility research, its release described his clinic as the only one in the U.S. focused on fascia disorders.

More than a decade of musculoskeletal ultrasound is what holds it together: the same imaging skill that guides a needle between fascial planes is what lets him see — and document — what other exams miss. And the field comes to him to learn it. He is the developer and lead instructor of Tulane’s First Wave Ultrasound Course, a CME-accredited program training athletic trainers and physical therapists to bring imaging into everyday care — and handheld-ultrasound maker Butterfly retained him as a consultant, publishing his playbook on point-of-care ultrasound in sports medicine.

Pillar Three · Hypermobility & EDS

From running Tulane’s hypermobility clinic to a discovery that reframed the condition.

Dr. Courseault built and led Tulane’s Hypermobility & EDS Clinic — as principal investigator of the $200,000 grant that established it — and that is where the central research question of his career took shape: why do so many hypermobile patients share the same constellation of joint laxity, fatigue, gut symptoms, and dysautonomia? His answer — first posted as a 2022 preprint, then peer-reviewed in Heliyon (2023) — proposed folate-dependent hypermobility syndrome: a mechanism connecting the MTHFR gene variant to disorganized connective tissue, and with it, a testable, treatable framework for a condition long dismissed as untreatable. The follow-up study in ACR Open Rheumatology (2024) documented just how prevalent MTHFR polymorphisms are among hEDS and HSD patients in a U.S. hypermobility clinic.

The work did not stay inside journals. Tulane’s announcement of the discovery was picked up nationally by SciTechDaily, drew an hour-long interview from an Australian athletic-development podcast, and — in June 2026 — brought NPR Louisiana to his door. His group has also presented at the field’s own venues: the 2022 International Scientific Symposium on the Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes and the 2023 AAP Physiatry Annual Meeting. He developed and ran an eight-hour symposium on evaluating and treating hypermobile patients and athletes, serves as a peer reviewer for the International Consortium on Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes & Related Disorders, and his invited-lecture circuit on the condition runs from Tulane’s Hayward Genetics Center to UPMC.

And the clinical commitment came first and remains: the Hypermobility & EDS Clinic in New Orleans — a structured, physician-led, five-visit protocol that NPR Louisiana introduced as “one of the world’s first clinics and treatment centers specifically for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.”

“Hypermobility is not rare. Hypermobility is like a Ferrari that requires a lot of maintenance and the best synthetic oil.”

Dr. Jacques Courseault — Tulane research announcement, via SciTechDaily (2023)

The Research Record

Every publication. Every link. Check it yourself.

Peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations, and an open clinical case library published by The Fascia Institute — the paper trail behind every technique offered in clinic.

Honors & Leadership

Recognized by peers. Trusted with programs.

In the Media

When reporters need the fascia and hypermobility story, this is who they call.

Public radio, New Orleans television, national science press, and international podcasts — each one independently sought out Dr. Courseault’s work.

Earlier Broadcast Appearances

Fox 8 News and WDSU — heat-illness prevention (2019)  ·  WWL Radio — heat stroke (2019) and treating fascial pain (2024)  ·  One-hour podcast — folate-deficient hypermobility (2023)

The Bottom Line

Plenty of clinics borrow the word “fascia.” One built the field around it.

Any one credential on this page can be found elsewhere. A board-certified sports medicine physician is not rare. A clinician with a peer-reviewed paper is not rare. What is rare — arguably unique — is the full stack in one physician: team-physician years across four Louisiana universities, event medicine from the Sugar Bowl and Cotton Bowl to Major League Rugby, the first publication on fascial hydrodissection for chronic hamstring injury, two invented procedures, a published mechanism and follow-up study defining a new hypermobility diagnosis, one of the world’s first dedicated EDS clinics, Castle Connolly and New Orleans Top Doctor honors, and a media record running from WWL-TV to NPR to the national science press.

That is why patients fly to New Orleans from around the world, why professional athletes trust their careers to this clinic, and why — when hypermobility finally gets the awareness and research funding it deserves — some of the foundational work will trace back to a practice on Harvard Avenue in Metairie.

Bring this expertise to your case.

Whether you are an athlete with an injury that will not resolve, or you have spent years suspecting your joints, fatigue, and symptoms are connected — the evaluation starts here.

Hypermobility & EDS ClinicRequest an Appointment

The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center® · 2520 Harvard Ave., Ste. 2B, Metairie, LA 70001 · (504) 704-1254