Dr. ElAttrache asked ‘How do you think orthopedic surgeons in 10 years will look back at how sports medicine and orthopedic surgeries are being done today’?
Article Link: From wartime to game time, Dr. Neal ElAttrache operates at the forefront of surgical advancement (beckersspine.com)
A decade from now, one defining aspect of orthopedic surgery in 2024 will have been the speed at which new techniques are adopted, Neal ElAttrache, MD, said.
Dr. ElAttrache, head team physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers, spoke with Becker’s about his perspective on changes in orthopedics.
“When you look at the amount of time it takes for a new technique to become adopted worldwide, the time now is probably half of what it was when I started. As a general rule of thumb when I started, if you came up with a significant change in the way that something was done in surgery, it would take about a good decade for that to catch on with the mainstream.
These days technological advances have made it so that changes in surgery are easier to do by more surgeons. Exposure through the media and equipment companies really spread the word. With the way that communication exists now, the adoption time for a procedure is half of that might be five years now. I learned that when we developed a novel way to fix rotator cuff tears and with some of the new instruments that we devised that made doing that operation easier.
So the way they’re going to look back on what we’re doing now is I think that technology is changing so much faster than it was, and it’s going to make things easier to do. I don’t think that the overall surgical talent may not be much better than it is now. I trained guys that many of whom have never done an open shoulder operation; they just do it arthroscopically. There are some skills that are sort of falling by the wayside that won’t be as good as they are now. But overall the technology is changing the way that things are going to be done. I think that they’ll look back on this as and say, well they had to be a bit more invasive. They had to do this with a little bit more surgical exposure and maybe the recovery times were longer.
So the long answer to a simple question is orthopedic surgeons will look back on the field and probably be doing procedures with a greater degree of difference. If you look at how I’m doing it now compared to how Frank Jobe, MD, taught me over 30 years from now, there will be a much bigger difference 30 years from now than there was 30 years ago, and it’s all because of technology and biologic knowledge.”
Read full interview here.
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