Blog
Practical advice, injury prevention, and surgical care for shoulders, elbows, and hands.
What to Bring to Your Specialist Consultation
Six things: your referral, your scans, a list of your medications, details of any previous surgery, your questions, and your Medicare card. That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is the detail behind each one, and the two rules almost nobody knows about referrals. This applies to any specialist appointment. It is…
What Happens at a First Appointment with an Upper Limb Surgeon
A first appointment with a surgeon takes about 30 to 40 minutes and involves far more talking than most people expect. You will be asked how the problem started, examined properly, and shown your scans. You will leave with a diagnosis and a plan. In a good number of cases, that plan does not include…
Six Questions to Ask Before You Agree to Surgery
The best questions to ask before surgery are the ones that could talk you out of it. If a surgeon cannot answer them without getting uncomfortable, that is information. Six questions cover almost everything that matters, and none of them require you to know anything about medicine. Nobody arrives at a surgical consultation on their…
What a Specialist Upper Limb Surgeon Actually Treats
An upper limb surgeon treats everything from the shoulder blade to the fingertip. Shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, and the fractures and injuries that affect any of them. It is one of the narrower fields within orthopaedics, and one of the least understood, because almost nobody outside medicine has heard the term. Most people arrive with…
When Shoulder Pain Needs a Surgeon and When It Needs a Physio
Most shoulders that hurt do not need an operation. If your shoulder has been sore for a few weeks, the practitioner most likely to help you is a physiotherapist, not a surgeon. Surgery is the right answer for a minority of shoulder problems, and knowing when to see a shoulder surgeon rather than a physiotherapist…
- « Previous
- 1
- …
- 3
- 4
- 5