The meeting
A/Prof Cutbush attended the Australian Hand Surgery Society Annual Scientific Meeting in Sydney in March 2016, held jointly with the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.
What the Australian Hand Surgery Society is
The Australian Hand Surgery Society is the national body for surgeons who treat conditions of the hand, wrist and upper limb. Its membership includes orthopaedic surgeons and plastic surgeons, because hand surgery sits across both specialties, and it holds an annual scientific meeting at which members present research and discuss the management of difficult problems. Societies of this kind are the main forum in which a subspecialty works out and records what it regards as sound practice.
Why a joint meeting with the American society
The American Society for Surgery of the Hand is the equivalent body in the United States and one of the larger hand surgery organisations in the world. Holding a meeting jointly means the faculty and the research presented are drawn from both countries.
That matters more than it may appear. A national society tends to see the same patient population, train through the same programme and converge on the same answers. A combined meeting puts those answers in front of surgeons who may have approached the same problem from a different starting point, which is one of the few reliable ways of noticing a habit that has gone unexamined.
Where the shoulder fits
Upper limb surgery is usually divided between the hand and wrist on one side and the shoulder and elbow on the other, but the divide is not a clean one. A patient with a nerve injury may have problems anywhere from the neck to the fingertips. The brachial plexus, the network of nerves that supplies the whole arm, is of direct interest to hand surgeons and shoulder surgeons alike, and so are stiffness, tendon transfers and the assessment of a weak arm.
Attending the meetings of an adjacent subspecialty is a practical way of keeping up with the parts of the upper limb that overlap. Individual results vary, and the management of any upper limb problem depends on the individual assessment.
Related information
See our brachial plexus exploration and shoulder anatomy pages, and also our posts on the Queensland Hand Surgery Society scientific meeting and QHSS meeting.