Marrow
Orthopaedics
Bones, joints, and the trade of putting them back together.
13 posts
The learning curve nobody warns you about
The 10,000-hour rule is told by people who never counted. The hours are not linear — and the plateau is where judgement is quietly built.
What a fracture clinic is actually optimised for
A fracture clinic is graded on throughput. The patient experiences something else entirely. The gap between the two scorecards is where all the interesting
How a reverse shoulder cheats physics — an interactive explainer
Why putting the ball where the socket was lets a torn-cuff shoulder lift again. Toggle the geometry and watch the deltoid's moment arm grow.
Glenoid version, in your hands
Why a few degrees of retroversion matters — with a baseplate you can tilt yourself. Drag the sliders and watch the failure risk climb the curve.
What live navigation actually changes in shoulder replacement
Navigation for glenoid baseplate fixation is usually sold as precision for its own sake. The real value is what it does to your worst cases.
Your femur is hollow, and it did that on purpose
A long bone resists bending far better than the solid rod it could have been — at the same weight. The reason is geometry, not material, and the skeleton w
Robert Liston and the operation with 300% mortality
The fastest knife of the pre-anaesthetic era, and the famous amputation that supposedly killed three people. The legend is irresistible. It is also, sadly,
The rotator cuff is a set of guy-ropes, and that explains a lot
Why a torn shoulder still lifts the arm sometimes, and refuses other times. It is levers and angles, not magic. Drag the line of pull and find out.
Before the FRCS: what bone-setters knew
For centuries fracture care belonged to families of bone-setters, not surgeons. Some of what they practised survived peer review remarkably well — and one family changed surgery itself.
Trepanation: the operation that refuses to die
Humans have been drilling holes in living skulls for about 7,000 years, and a surprising number of patients survived. What the holes tell us, era by era.
How long does a new hip last? It depends who is asking
A joint replacement does not have a use-by date. It has a survival curve, and reading one honestly means asking who the patient is. Poke the curve and see.
Why surgeons should build their own software
The tools clinicians are given are built by people who have never carried a bleep. The gap between workflow and software is a design brief.
How to find a significant result in pure noise (please do not)
p<0.05 does not mean what most people think. Keep testing the same nothing and a significant result will eventually appear. Watch the trap spring, live.