Patient Outcomes

What Percentage is “Useless Orthopedic Surgery” Based on Research?

This is a post that some orthopedic surgeons will hate but that needs to be written. This week, I decided to try and estimate the number of orthopedic surgeries that were still being done despite research showing they didn’t work. When I was done, I realized that a staggering 53% of orthopedic surgeries being performed…read more

Hand Surgery Side Effects That Can Easily Be Avoided…

If you’ve ever wondered why sometimes I seem to be a bit “anti-surgery,” you would only need to spend a day with me in clinic to find out why. We see surgery train wrecks day in and day out. What makes them so upsetting is that most of the time, the surgery could have been…read more

Stem Cell Disc Injection: The Hammer and the Nail

There’s a saying in medicine, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Meaning that if all the doctor knows how to do for a given problem is one treatment, then he or she tends to use that treatment when it’s not appropriate. This morning I’d like to highlight a stem…read more

The Reality of Hip Labrum Tear Surgery Results

The hip joint is a ball-and-socket structure, and when a bone spur develops on either the ball or the socket, this is called a femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), or a hip impingement. With an impingement, the concept is that you have a misshapen ball or socket that is somehow damaging or creating tears in the labrum,…read more

Spondylolysis Treatment Options: Healing the Spine with an Injection Rather than Surgery

What happens when a precise stem cell injection is used instead of surgery to treat spondylolysis? This is the story of NH, an Ivy League wrestler whose career was stopped in its tracks by a traumatic fracture of the spine called spondylolysis. His parents knew that fusing this young man’s spine at his young age…read more

The Side Effects of Hip Labrum Surgery: Brian’s Story

Yesterday was my last day seeing my patients at the licensed, advanced stem-cell-culture site in Grand Cayman. It’s been a great week, capped off with a heartfelt thank you from a young medical student we have been able to help through the years. His thanks are really the quintessential reason every doctor is a doctor—to help…read more

SI Joint Fusion Results and Review

This week I’ve been exchanging emails with a surgeon who does SI joint fusions. It’s been interesting as I’ve been seeing more and more advertising by a company pushing expensive, minimally invasive sacroiliac fusion devices. The surgeon didn’t like a post I did while back on the SI joint fusion technology, so I decided to…read more

See One, Do One, Teach One: Your Orthopedic Regen Med Doctor Likely Has Little Training

This next weekend we’re teaching an orthopedic stem cell training for physicians course in Colorado through the Interventional Orthopedics Foundation (IOF). Maybe because of this, the past few weeks I’ve noticed the different levels of expertise at which orthopedic stem cells are delivered. The problem is that while this impacts the quality of the treatment…read more