What does a truly effective conversation look like when you're trying to help a patient navigate the choice in their life changing moments? How does the conversation look like?

Yeah, there's a lot of hard conversations that we have the opportunity to have in our careers.

Certainly in my world, the two hardest conversations that I have are, sir, ma'am, I need to tell you that you have cancer.

and all of the part of that conversation that flows from that.

And the second broad category of regular difficult conversations that I have is I need to remove a body part, a limb, an amputation conversation.

It is unequivocally, and I'm absolutely convinced about this, by far and away the most visceral reaction that patients have is not to the cancer conversation.

I've had patients laugh, cry, joke around, walk out of the room on me, do all kinds of things with the cancer scenario.

Let's say if you had to distill everything that we talked about right now into one guiding principle, what do you think every orthopedic surgeon should remember when deciding where the limits of surgery really lie?