Journal & Articles
150 articles on upper limb surgery, patient care, research, AI, training and leadership. Each article has a permanent, shareable URL.
The best research in the world, communicated poorly, changes nothing. The clearest writing in medicine is not a stylistic achievement β it is a clinical one. When evidence is communicated with precision and accessibility, it reaches the clinicians who need it, influences the decisions that matter, and ultimately improves the care that patients receive.
Read article βThe gap between what research demonstrates and what clinicians do is one of the most persistent and consequential problems in healthcare. Closing it begins not at the implementation stage but at the design stage β with research questions that matter, study designs that answer them, and dissemination plans that reach the people who need the findings.
Read article βPeer review is the mechanism by which the scientific community maintains the quality of its published evidence. It is also one of the most important contributions a clinician-researcher can make to their field β and one of the least systematically taught. Learning to review well is learning to read the literature well, and both are essential skills for evidence-based practice.
Read article βScience that cannot be reproduced is not science. It is published opinion. The open science movement β pre-registration, data sharing, open access publication, and transparent reporting β is not an ideological position. It is the natural evolution of a research enterprise that takes seriously its obligation to produce findings that are true, reproducible, and usable.
Read article βThe ability to read a clinical study critically β to identify what it actually shows, what its limitations are, and whether its conclusions are justified β is one of the most important and most undervalued skills in medicine. It is the difference between being informed by evidence and being misled by it.
Read article βA well-conducted systematic review is one of the most valuable contributions a clinician-researcher can make to the evidence base of their specialty. A poorly conducted one β with incomplete search strategies, inconsistent study selection, and inappropriate pooling of heterogeneous studies β may be worse than no synthesis at all, because it provides false precision around unreliable conclusions.
Read article βA research idea without funding is a hypothesis without a future. Grant writing is not a bureaucratic exercise β it is the discipline of articulating why a question matters, how you will answer it rigorously, and why you and your team are the right people to do so. These are the most important questions a researcher can answer about their own work.
Read article βYou do not need to be a statistician to practise excellent evidence-based medicine. You do need enough statistical literacy to know when a result is being overstated, when a confidence interval tells you more than a p-value, and when a study that sounds impressive is telling you very little. That literacy is learnable β and it protects your patients.
Read article βA technically perfect operation on a radiograph that leaves a patient unable to sleep, unable to work, and unable to do the things that make life meaningful is not a success. Patient-reported outcome measures exist because we recognised, finally, that the surgeon's assessment of a good result and the patient's experience of one are not the same thing β and that the patient's experience is the one that matters.
Read article βThe clinician-researcher is one of the most valuable contributors to medical progress β because they bring the questions that clinical practice generates to the scientific methods that can answer them. Building a research career alongside clinical practice is not a compromise between two competing demands. It is the integration of two mutually enriching activities that make each other better.
Read article βEvery clinical consultation brings together two experts. The clinician brings knowledge of the diagnosis, the evidence, the surgical options, and the likely outcomes. The patient brings knowledge of their own life β their values, their priorities, their tolerance for risk, and what a good outcome actually means to them. Shared decision-making is what happens when both forms of expertise are genuinely respected.
Read article βYour patient has almost certainly researched their condition before they arrive. Some of what they have found is excellent. Some is promotional content dressed as patient education. Some is well-intentioned but outdated. Your role in the consultation has evolved: you are no longer the first source of medical information. You are now its most important interpreter.
Read article βThe question most patients ask before surgery is: what happens afterwards? The question that most predicts their outcome is: what happens before? Prehabilitation β the systematic optimisation of a patient's physical and psychological readiness before a planned procedure β is one of the most evidence-supported and most underutilised interventions in elective surgery.
Read article βPost-operative pain is one of the most universal and most personally significant experiences that surgical patients face. Managing it well β with sufficient effectiveness to allow rehabilitation, with sufficient care to avoid harm β is one of the most important things a surgical team does. It deserves the same evidence-based rigour as any other clinical decision.
Read article βTelling an athlete they can return to sport at six months is not a clinical decision. It is a calendar event. The clinical decision β the one that determines whether they return safely, perform confidently, and avoid re-injury β is the one that answers: has this athlete demonstrated the specific functional criteria that make return to their sport safe and appropriate? Time is a necessary condition. It is not a sufficient one.
Read article βA patient who seeks a second opinion is not being disloyal to their surgeon. They are being responsible about one of the most significant decisions they may ever make about their health. The clinical culture that facilitates second opinions β openly, without defensiveness β is a safer, more trustworthy culture than the one that discourages them.
Read article βThe patient who expects to recover fully engages with rehabilitation differently from one who expects to remain limited. The one who understands why their pain is temporary behaves differently from one who fears it signals ongoing damage. The psychological dimensions of recovery are not separate from the clinical ones. They are woven into every aspect of the healing process β and attending to them is part of delivering excellent surgical care.
Read article βWhen an older person fractures their shoulder or injures their hand, the injury is the beginning of the clinical story β not the whole of it. Understanding the person behind the injury, their functional goals, their living situation, their bone health, and their capacity for recovery requires a breadth of clinical attention that the traditional fracture consultation was not designed to provide. It is the breadth that produces the best outcomes.
Read article βThe best sports injury is the one that never happens. Prevention is the most cost-effective, most evidence-supported intervention in sports medicine β and it is the one that receives the least attention in clinical practice, the least funding in sports science, and the least prominence in the sports culture that drives athletes to train and compete. Changing this is one of the most impactful things sports medicine practitioners can advocate for.
Read article βRegenerative medicine represents one of the most genuinely exciting frontiers in orthopaedics. The biological rationale for using the body's own healing mechanisms to restore damaged tendons, cartilage, and bone is compelling. The evidence base is growing. And the clinical applications β used appropriately, in well-selected patients, with realistic expectations β are producing outcomes that previous generations of surgeons could not have offered.
Read article βThe evidence that guides orthopaedic practice worldwide is generated predominantly in a small number of well-resourced centres in high-income countries, in patient populations that represent a fraction of the global disease burden. OrthoGlobe was founded on the conviction that this can change β and that the technology and the will to change it are both available, right now, to those who choose to act.
Read article βHealthcare is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions globally. Surgery is among the most resource-intensive activities within healthcare. Acknowledging this is not an attack on the value of what surgeons do β it is the beginning of a responsible conversation about how we do it better, for patients and for the planet simultaneously.
Read article βApproximately 14 million people travel internationally for medical care each year. The majority of them make that journey with incomplete digital health records, unclear post-operative plans, and no continuity of care infrastructure connecting them to their home healthcare system. This is a patient safety gap with a technology solution β and building that solution is one of the most impactful contributions digital health can make to global patient welfare.
Read article βEvidence-based medicine is only as equitable as the evidence on which it is based. When the studies that populate our clinical guidelines exclude the populations most affected by the conditions they address, we are not practising evidence-based medicine for those patients. We are extrapolating β and the consequences of that extrapolation fall on those who are already most underserved.
Read article βThe most dangerous moment in a surgical career is not the early years, when uncertainty is acknowledged and supervision is expected. It is the middle years, when accumulated competence can quietly become overconfidence β when experience begins to substitute for evidence and familiarity begins to substitute for rigour. Clinical humility is the habit that prevents this drift, and it is worth cultivating deliberately throughout a career.
Read article βThe outcomes of patients with complex musculoskeletal conditions are determined not by the best individual in the clinical team but by how well the team functions together. Leadership that produces excellent team function is among the most impactful clinical skills a surgeon can develop β and it is rarely taught with the same rigour as operative technique.
Read article βEvery meaningful innovation in surgery began with a clinician who was dissatisfied with the status quo β who looked at a clinical problem, decided it was solvable, and had the persistence to solve it. That pathway from clinical frustration to scalable solution is available to any surgeon willing to commit to it. The tools, the collaborators, and the frameworks have never been more accessible.
Read article βFive billion people worldwide lack access to safe, affordable surgical care. Every year, 17 million people die from conditions that would be treatable with timely surgery. These numbers are so large that they risk becoming abstract. They should not. Behind each one is a person with a name, a family, and a treatable condition that became fatal because the infrastructure to treat it was absent.
Read article βThe careers in medicine that I find most inspiring are not those that achieved the most within a single lane. They are those that built something genuinely new at the intersection of disciplines β where clinical experience, research rigour, and technological possibility meet. That intersection is, right now, one of the most productive and most needed places a surgeon can choose to work.
Read article βIf I could sit across from the version of myself beginning surgical training, there are things I would want to say β not to save them from difficulty, but to help them make better use of it. Because the difficulties, it turns out, were not the obstacles to the career. They were the material from which the career was built.
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