How painful is surgery? Surprisingly, it’s not nearly as bad as most patients think it will be. When we pull our patients after surgery, the vast majority, 95% of them, say that it’s not nearly as bad as they thought it would be. We use a multimodal pain approach and very small incisions. We use muscle-sparing techniques and bone-sparing techniques. Because of the technologies that we have and use now, we can perform the procedure in less than 30 minutes. Because of the technology we use now and our rehab techniques, we accelerate our rehabilitation by letting people move their arms quickly. D ..read more

A common question about shoulder replacements is how long it takes to recover. It depends on what you mean by recover. In terms of daily activities, you can do it right away. You can drive a car, eat, feed yourself, use the restroom, and use your shoulder for all activities of daily living right after the operation, within a couple of days. We want to wait about three months before lifting anything more than five to ten pounds. You can do all the normal stuff immediately to get through the day. At three months, you can get back to lifting and sporting activities. Then, after around six months ..read more

A common question people ask about shoulder replacements is, what are the downsides? You’re having an operation. There will always be a risk of an infection or an injury to a nerve or a blood vessel with any procedure in the human body. Fortunately, shoulder replacements in our practice have reduced that risk to less than 1%. There’s a chance that you won’t still have any pain, and no surgery is 100%. And there’s a chance that you could wear the prosthesis out in 15, 20, or 30 years. We’ve continued to evolve as best we can to mitigate those things, but no procedure is 100%. Nothing is perfect ..read more

A common question people ask is, what is a shoulder replacement? A shoulder replacement is when we go into your shoulder and replace the joint.  We remove parts of the bone that are arthritic or worn out and replace them with metal and plastic that’s shaped similar to what we took out that’s in the anatomic. In the reverse, it’s flipped, the ball and socket are flipped, but just picture your mind that what we’re doing is making cuts in the bone and setting implants in the bone that grow into the bone. We don’t cement them anymore unless it’s a special circumstance, but 99% are not cemente ..read more

Patients’ common fear or concern with rotator cuff surgeries is whether they can wait too long. And the answer is yes, you can.  Suppose you have a massive rotator cuff tear that’s retracted. In that case, it undergoes irreversible fatty atrophy.  An analogy I give patients is to think of their rotator cuff like an accordion. It’s a muscle. At the end of it, it’s a tendon. It goes into the bone. But if that accordion gets torn and shortens, it stays short. You can’t get it back to length if it stays there too long. It’ll stay permanently short. And even though we can always get that ..read more

A common question about shoulder surgeries is whether arthroscopic surgery is worth it. It’s worth it.  New arthroscopic surgery is an incredible advance in orthopaedics—in medicine in general. It allows surgeons to operate through small poke holes.  Initially, it was more difficult because we lacked the necessary instrumentation. But as we’ve evolved, especially in the last 20 years in shoulders specifically, the instrumentation has improved.  Also, you have surgeons who have grown up doing this, and this is how we’ve been trained and taught by the surgeons who had to go throug ..read more

How long does shoulder surgery take? It depends on the surgeon and the surgery. For rotator cuff tears, it’s about an hour and a half. I would say that’s the average for most surgeons. It depends on the size of the tear, and it depends on the surgeon. We typically take around 20 minutes. That’s because we perform this operation 400 times a year, which is an extremely high volume.  Most surgeons doing rotator cuff repairs are doing around 30 to 50 a year, on average. So we do eight to ten times that much and just with that a level of volume that we do would become much more efficient ..read more

  How can I tell if I tore my rotator cuff? The main thing is just pain—pain in your shoulder, pain at rest, pain with daily activities, pain with lifting—a huge one. This has been studied across the board and shown repeatedly that if your shoulder keeps you up at night, where you can’t sleep, or it wakes you up repeatedly, there is a high likelihood that you have it toward the rotator cuff. The main things are just pain. Pain with rest, just sitting there, pain with activities, vigorous activities, putting on your clothes, reaching up to grab something from a cabinet, and things like th ..read more

Welcome to our Labral Repair Preoperative FAQ video! We’ve compiled this resource to address the most common queries patients have regarding this surgery. By the end of this video, we aim to have answered the majority of your questions, providing you with a clearer understanding of our unique surgical process. Why Choose Us? We perform nearly 150 labral repairs annually, a volume ten times higher than the average for most surgeons, including those specializing in sports medicine or shoulder treatments. This high volume of surgeries enhances our expertise, allowing us to handle complexities wi ..read more

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on shoulder arthroplasty, aimed at addressing your preoperative questions and concerns. This video is part of our mission to ensure that you’re well-informed and comfortable with the procedure ahead. Remember, while this guide covers the majority of cases, individual circumstances may vary. Understanding Shoulder Arthroplasty Shoulder arthroplasty, or shoulder replacement surgery, can significantly improve your quality of life. Moving from severe discomfort and limited mobility to a fully functional shoulder represents a dramatic transformation for many pati ..read more