Chairing the symposium
Dr Kenneth Cutbush chaired Zimmer Biomet's Advanced Shoulder Symposium in Sydney, alongside Prof John Sperling of the Mayo Clinic.
International guest speakers included Prof Sperling and David Schneider. A highlight was the round table discussion hosted by Prof Sperling, a format that tends to produce more candid exchanges than a lecture does.
With thanks to the organisers and to Zimmer Biomet for their work on the programme.
Why industry supported symposiums are held
Implant manufacturers organise educational meetings for the surgeons who use their systems, and the reason is a practical one. A shoulder replacement system comes with its own instrumentation, its own planning software and its own sequence of steps, and a surgeon adopting it needs to learn that sequence from people who know it thoroughly. The manufacturer is usually the only organisation with access both to the full set of instruments and to the surgeons across several countries who have used the system longest.
Meetings of this kind are declared as industry supported, and surgeons who present at them disclose the relationship. That disclosure is the mechanism by which an audience can weigh what it hears.
What a round table adds
A lecture presents a settled position. A round table does something different. It puts several surgeons with different habits in front of the same case and asks each of them what they would do, in front of a room that will notice any evasion.
The disagreements are the useful part, because they mark out the areas where the evidence does not yet settle the question and the decision still rests on judgement. Shoulder arthroplasty has a number of those: when to choose a reverse replacement over an anatomic one, how to deal with a socket that has worn unevenly and tilted, how much of a stem to use in the arm bone, and when to revise a replacement that is painful without being obviously loose. Individual results vary, and decisions of this kind are made for individual patients after assessment rather than by rule.
Related information
See also our post on visiting Dr John Sperling at the Mayo Clinic, and our anatomic total shoulder replacement, reverse total shoulder replacement and shoulder arthritis pages.