The Operation Everyone Said Would Never Work | Prof David Sonnabend

In 1981 a rotator cuff repair was regarded as an impossible operation. When David Sonnabend presented a case at the weekly meeting at Royal North Shore, senior colleagues told him not to bother. It never works. Give them some steroids and send them on their way. His patient was a little Italian stonemason whose entire cuff had come away. Without a repair the man's trade was finished and his family was in trouble. Sonnabend and his first registrar, Des Bokor, read up an approach that had been described in England, reattached the cuff slowly, and the man went back to work. Every year for the next twenty years, until he died, a dozen bottles of red wine arrived. Years earlier, a young consultant at a small district hospital had been handed the patient nobody else would touch. The Health Minister's mother, a shattered shoulder, an operation he had never seen performed. He read what literature there was, then picked up the phone and called New York. Charles Neer, the father of shoulder surgery, talked him through it down the line while Sonnabend sat in his lounge room with three textbooks and a notepad. He never did a fellowship. He did one of the first reverse shoulder replacements in Australia without having seen one. He founded the Shoulder and Elbow Society of Australia with Des Bokor by rewriting the Knee Society constitution. He designed the retractor that carries his name, and an oval glenoid reamer that a major implant company bought and shelved. Ask him what mattered most and it is not the papers. It is the more than fifty surgeons he trained. I did not have a wife in orthopaedics, he says, but the younger guys became a family. IN THIS EPISODE 02:13 The phone call to Charles Neer 06:47 Indonesia, and real pathology 08:06 The fellowship that fell through 10:49 Three months with Charles Neer 13:00 One of the first rotator cuff repairs in Australia 15:10 One of Australia's first reverse shoulder replacements 18:17 If in doubt, don't 20:42 Why training surgeons mattered most 24:38 The 1998 congress in Sydney 27:33 The oval reamer that got shelved 32:27 Advice to his younger self 33:40 There's no condition that surgery can't make worse   Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dwI7OE5XcNk Inside The Shoulder is hosted by Associate Professor Kenneth Cutbush, a specialist orthopaedic shoulder surgeon in Brisbane, Australia.