Drawn by hand
My father has been drawing the anatomy pictures for the website, to help explain the details of the shoulder.
A drawing can do something a photograph or a scan cannot: leave out everything that is not relevant to the point being made. For explaining to a patient which structure has been injured and why it matters, a clear line drawing is often better than an image of the real thing.
Thank you. Not bad at 92.
What the drawings have to show
The shoulder is difficult to picture because several structures overlap in a small space. The ball of the upper arm bone sits against a shallow socket on the shoulder blade. A rim of cartilage called the labrum deepens that socket. Four rotator cuff tendons wrap around the ball and hold it against the socket while allowing it to rotate. Ligaments and the joint capsule surround the whole arrangement, and a bursa sits between the cuff and the bone above it. In a photograph or a scan all of these are present at once and hard to separate from one another. A drawing can show one layer at a time.
Why illustration matters in explaining a diagnosis
Most people have no reason to know what a labrum or a subscapularis tendon is before they are told that something has happened to theirs. A diagnosis makes considerably more sense once a patient can see where the structure sits, what it normally does and what has changed. That understanding also helps with the decisions that follow, because the reasons for considering one treatment rather than another usually depend on which structure is involved and how much of it is affected. Individual results vary.
A drawing can also be marked up during a consultation, which a printed diagram cannot. Pointing to the exact spot on a clear line drawing is often the moment an explanation becomes concrete.
Related information
See our shoulder anatomy page, our shoulder injuries page for the conditions these drawings illustrate, and our consultation page.