Patient Education

Side Effects of Steroids: Joint Replacement Infections AGAIN…

I’ve blogged quite a bit on the inconvenient truth that while steroid medications are powerful anti-inflammatories that are commonly used without much medical thought, they’re really bad for your body. As one example, a prior highlighted study had shown that getting a hip steroid shot increases the likelihood that a hip replacement surgery will fail…read more

Does Cartilage Heal on Its Own?

Whether or not cartilage heals on its own, according to a new study, depends on your age, and, unfortunately, that age may be much lower than we realized. We’ve known for a long time that the healing cells in our cartilage, such as our hip and knee joints, drastically decrease as we age, slowing or…read more

Statins and Stem Cells: Barely There Results

Pharma is pretty funny sometimes. They have manufactured a 20 billion-dollar-a-year market on data that would normally get laughed out of a scientific conference in any other area of medicine. Now with major patents expiring on their statin cash cows, their next move to keep the gravy train rolling is called “combination therapies.” This means…read more

Fix the Neck Curve: Surgery Is Not the Answer

The neck curve is the red-headed stepchild of spine care. Thankfully, spine surgeons, after ignoring this issue for many years, are just starting to realize its importance. Regrettably, the surgeries they’re performing to fix the neck curve are for the most part unnecessary and causing more harm than good, but, heck, you can’t have everything. Let’s…read more

Dural Leak Treatment: Harry’s Story…

Most patients are unaware that there’s fluid around their brain, spinal cord, and nerve roots that literally floats their whole neurologic system. They also don’t realize that the system designed to hold it all can spring a leak and that when it does, all heck can break loose. While we’ve treated many patients with dural…read more

Hip Arthritis Getting Worse? New Research Says It Could Be the Bone

Is your hip arthritis getting worse? In addition to cartilage breakdown, your bone could also be deteriorating. A bright spot (or dark spot depending on the imaging sequence used) on the bone on MRI is called a bone marrow lesion (BML, also called a BME which means bone marrow edema). It’s an area in the…read more

Sitting and Sciatica Pain: How I Solved It With a Walk

On this page: What is sciatica? How are sitting and sciatica pain related? How does walking help sciatica pain? I’ve been at a medical conference lecturing all week, basically a sit fest. Despite trying to exercise every day and get up and move as much as feasible, my intermittent sciatica was singing last night at…read more

Our Annual Stem Cell Research in Orthopedics Update—2016 Edition

Every year for the last few, I’ve created an infographic summarizing stem cell research in orthopedics. Every year, the list gets bigger and the number of patient results represented grows. This year is no different! (Click here for a larger view) How Is This Created? I searched the US National Library of Medicine under several…read more