Elective Surgery: Doctors Have to Eat Too!

A rotator cuff tear is a common cause of pain and disability among adults. It will definitely weaken your shoulder, making many daily activities, like combing your hair or getting dressed, slightly painful and difficult to do. You could choose to live with this pain or shave your head or join a nudist colony, or you could hire a surgeon to rip open your shoulder and put in some pins and sew it up, and then it will be excruciatingly painful and completely useless for many months, until some time in the future when it might get better. By then something else will hurt, however, since bodies do tend to fall apart eventually, especially if you use them a lot.

You'd think that with about 40,000 rotator cuff surgeries being performed in the United States each year, there must be solid medical evidence supporting the effectiveness of that treatment. However, not so. Actually, more than 150 published medical papers conclude there is "no solid evidence that rotator cuff surgery benefited patients more than no surgery." (Please do not tell my husband about this.)

However, despite the absence of any published papers in medical journals, we can certainly all agree that rotator cuff surgery benefits the surgeons greatly.  In fact, the smartest boy in my high school class, our valedictorian, became an orthopedic surgeon in Salt Lake City, giving him unlimited access to all those athletic skiers and snowboarders and hikers, each with a couple of shoulders, not to mention hips and knees, needing repair. Last I heard he had moved to Moab, probably plugging into all those rock climbers and mountain bikers....ouch!

So if you want your kids to make a lot of money to pay off their school loans, have them become orthopedic surgeons. After all, those aging baby boomers--there are about 75 million of them alive today-- have two shoulders apiece, and that is a whole heck of a lot of shoulders.