The evening
The Queensland Shoulder Society held a scientific evening in June 2015. Two guest speakers, Associate Professor Des Bokor of Sydney and Dr Jim Fardoulys of Brisbane, gave talks on shoulder instability, followed by dinner with the other society members.
What the Queensland Shoulder Society is
The Queensland Shoulder Society is a state based group of surgeons and allied health practitioners with a particular interest in the shoulder. It meets through the year for scientific evenings of the kind described here, at which one or two speakers present on a topic and the discussion afterwards is often as useful as the talk itself.
Groups of this kind exist because a subspecialty needs somewhere local and regular to meet. A national conference comes round once a year. A state society can put a difficult problem in front of colleagues within a few weeks, and the people in the room are the same people the patient may be referred on to.
What shoulder instability is
The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body, and that mobility comes at the cost of stability. The ball at the top of the upper arm bone sits against a shallow socket on the shoulder blade, held in position by the labrum, the capsule and ligaments, and by the surrounding muscles. Shoulder instability is the term for a shoulder in which those restraints are no longer doing their job, so the joint dislocates completely, partly slips out of position, or simply feels as though it is about to.
It presents in several quite different ways. A young person who dislocates a shoulder playing contact sport has a different problem from someone whose shoulders have always been loose in every direction, and both differ again from a patient who has already had several operations. Treatment ranges from a supervised strengthening programme, through arthroscopic repair of the labrum, to a bone grafting procedure where bone is missing from the rim of the socket. Individual results vary, and which approach suits a particular shoulder depends on examination, imaging and what the patient needs the arm to do.
Related information
See our shoulder instability, anterior instability, arthroscopic Bankart repair and stabilisation pages, and our post on the Queensland Shoulder Society secretary role.