- May 10, 2016
You don’t have to be an NFL quarterback or an overhead athlete to sustain an injury to your shoulder. Oftentimes it can come from overuse and does live in life. As we get older, we develop degenerative diseases and these diseases then start to affect the quality of our life. Your shoulder condition lock up and you can’t move it.
Well, the shoulder is a very complex joint. There are a number of different structures that interact with each other such that having that specialized knowledge, that additional training in the shoulder gives you the ability to handle those subtleties.
It’s become extraordinarily much more common to have subspecialists in this area because of the emerging technology. And the interesting part is to stay abreast of the recent developments, technical improvements, changes in instrumentation, and to be on the cutting edge of some ways to really help with patient care. From a surgical standpoint, shoulder replacement is relatively new compared to the other joints. For instance, in the United States, in a year, there are only about 50,000 shoulder replacements. Over 60% of those are done by surgeons who do two a year. So for instance, I do close to 200 shoulder replacements a year, but I think there is an advantage to seeing someone who does the same thing again and again to get good at it. There are significant advances. This is the reverse shoulder replacement I’ve developed, and we are continually trying to measure our outcomes because we believe that we, this is how advances in medicine occur. Honestly, my arm is better than it was when I was 20 years old. See this smile that says it all.
