An invitation to the faculty
An invitation to join the faculty of the Advanced Shoulder and Elbow Symposium in Sydney in February 2018.
The international faculty includes Prof John Sperling of the Mayo Clinic and Dr Quinn Throckmorton of Memphis, Tennessee, both of whom have extensive experience in shoulder replacement surgery.
What a symposium faculty does
A surgical symposium is more than a series of lectures. The faculty is the group of surgeons who set the programme, give the sessions, chair the discussions and run whatever practical component there is. An invitation to join a faculty carries an obligation with it: to prepare and present material, to field questions on it from a room of people who perform the same operations, and, where the programme includes a practical component, to supervise other surgeons working through the steps of a technique.
Why practical and cadaveric courses exist
A surgeon learning an unfamiliar technique has to practise it somewhere, and the operating theatre is the wrong place for a first attempt. Practical courses, commonly using cadaveric specimens, allow the sequence of an operation to be worked through under the supervision of someone who performs it routinely, with the chance to stop, repeat a step, and ask why it is done one way rather than another.
The anatomy in a cadaveric specimen behaves much as it does in a patient, in a way that models and computer simulators cannot reproduce, particularly for arthroscopic work where orientation is everything. Courses of this kind are a standard part of how a new implant system or a modified technique is introduced responsibly rather than improvised.
Shoulder and elbow replacement
Shoulder replacement, in both its anatomic and its reverse forms, tends to dominate meetings of this kind. That is partly because the implant designs have changed a great deal, and partly because the decision between the two forms is not always straightforward and depends on the state of the rotator cuff and the pattern of wear in the socket.
Elbow replacement is a much smaller field, performed in far lower numbers, which is one reason it is usually discussed alongside the shoulder rather than on its own. Individual results vary, and whether a replacement is appropriate for a particular joint is a matter for assessment, imaging and discussion with the patient.
Related information
See our anatomic total shoulder replacement, reverse total shoulder replacement and shoulder arthritis pages, and our posts on the symposium faculty and the symposium itself.