Word: orthopedists
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...doctors. And they laugh at my jokes. But engineers, as a class, are possibly the best patients. They're logical and they're accustomed to the concept of consultation - they're interested in how the doctor thinks about their problem. They know how to use experts. If your orthopedist thinks about arthritis, for instance, in terms of friction between roughened joint surfaces, you should try to think about it, generally, in the same way. There is little use coming to him or her for help if you insist your arthritis is due to an imbalance between yin and yang...
Helluva nice guy, this football player - and big. His knee was the size of my head. It was an arthritic knee, as you would expect - a routine problem, like hundreds of others any orthopedist sees every year. Was I extra-nice to him, though, his being a star and all? Did I do anything different that day, just a little? I like to think not, always having tried never to be a "respecter of persons...
Putting a dislocated hip back in place, or "reducing the hip" in our jargon, requires a sedated patient. It is unquestionably the most athletically challenging of all medical procedures. Two people hold the patient down, the orthopedist climbs up on the stretcher, bends the knee, picks up the thigh and then uses a combination of delicate manipulation and great brute force to pop the hip back. My back always hurts for a week after I do one. Spasms of the huge muscles around the patient's hip must be controlled with intravenous sedation - or else the entire procedure...
...Absolutely not. This is a primrose path; no good orthopedist would actually buy any of this. I would blast any resident out of the water if they did this kind of work-up on a tennis leg - the same as my teachers would have blasted me. We train hard in medicine is to develop good clinical judgment: a feel for things. It's a lot like what tells a good cook the roast is ready, or a good teacher that the kid nodding in back doesn't really understand. Clinical judgment often makes a doctor do things the "objective tests...
...When my father, who is also an orthopedist, was in his 30s, he kept patients in the hospital for periods that would be considered ridiculous today. Those clavicle fracture patients were kept in for a week, carpal tunnel surgery patients stayed for a few days, a bad back might get five or six days. None of these patients ever stay over even one night now; even some go home the same day, and the carpal tunnel patients are out the door in less than an hour. I lived through the change - patients and doctors both were pretty nervous as discharges...