Miami Orthopedic Conference General Overview

Mon Oct 29, 2007
By Vicky Marlow

In a word Extraordinary! That best describes the past 4 days experience for me.

I met so many wonderful doctors there, it was truly amazing. The hardest thing for me was getting used to calling them by their first names, that was weird! Some of the wonderful docs I had a chance to speak with in detail were Mr. McMinn, Mr. Treacy, Dr. Su, Dr. Rogerson, Dr. Ure, Dr. Raterman, Dr. Rector and Dr. Cynthia Kelly. I just had to meet one of the very few female resurfacing surgeons out there. I also met quite a few other doctors but did not have the opportunity to talk with them since time was so limited. The highlight of my trip besides meeting some of the greats was being able to attend the cadaver training, wow! What an experience, hopefully I will post some pictures of that shortly. All I can say is, I would not want to be a surgeon's first.

It is my "opinion" that this is not a procedure that all surgeons are cut out for. There will be an elite group that will rise to the top in this field, the ones that possess the natural skill set for precision and placement and desire to perfect their techniques. Many will end up dropping out due to the complexity of this procedure. We have already seen here on surface hippy those that have made it to that elite group already. Some of the earlier adopters took the time to travel to the UK to learn this procedure then go on to observe other surgeons prior to performing their first procedure. I believe this will be a key to those that will make it and those that will not. This should be a question added to the list of questions to ask a new doctor. What training did they have, and was it any more than just one training session, did they also go to other surgeons and observe the surgery or train with them.

I introduced myself as a regular poster on surface hippy. Many docs were well aware of it and some even knew me by name. There were several that had never heard of us. Those that had not, I happily gave them my card and wrote the info for them on the back of it. It was also very interesting that on several of the slides during the presentations, there was mention of surface hippy. This community is really on the map in the ortho community. When people found out I had a BHR, they started to watch me walk, I was not aware of this. The last day some of the S&N reps came up to me and asked me which hip it was, they were betting it was my right. Wrong, I had my left hip done. I thought that was cool, since I wore high heels most of the time it is a good thing I didn't get blisters until the last day.

A lot of doors have opened up here for us. I now have direct email addresses for some of the top in the world that I did not have access to before. They have agreed to comment on several important issues regarding approaches, cemented/cementless, etc. and allow me to post it on the two boards. I will be putting together with Pat more quotes from some of these greats to add to the surfacehippy.info site as well as to the files section here.

Of course first of all, I was blown away by Mr. McMinn and Treacy, absolutely blown away. Two extremely charming, funny and dedicated surgeons. They now walk on water for me even more than before. Since I was another patient's guest and he was the guest speaker, I had the privilege of sitting at the head table with both of them at dinner on Friday night as well as the President of S&N, the elite group of MMT guys from the UK that were involved in the development of the BHR device and Dr. Bose. What an honor.

I have to say that I was extremely impressed by Dr. Rogerson, Dr. Raterman and Dr. Su. Dr. Su did a live surgery for a room full of orthopedic surgeons, not an easy task to do. I wonder who the patient was. Anyone have surgery with Dr. Su early morning last Thursday? Both Dr. Raterman and Dr. Rogerson are approaching 250 resurfacings each and Dr. Su is now at over 400. I would recommend any one of these surgeons in a hearbeat. Their dedication to resurfacing was very apparent to me.

Now this post was just my personal thoughts and I am NO medical expert and have never pretended to be, I also do not play one on TV.

Let me clarify that although this conference was put on by S&N, the majority of data that was presented were studies done that will be published and came from unbiased sources. Pat Campbell was one presenter and she comes from UCLA and the JRI group, etc. Also all the orthos that attended can choose different devices, so although the conference was sponsored by S&N the data was not just regarding the BHR device.