From Asia to Australia: Inside the 2026 SRS Traveling Fellowship | Scoliosis Dialogues

What was the most impressive case or presentation that you guys saw during your time?

Many, many, many great presentations.

But one that stands out is this concept of the folded man.

So for patients that have ankylosing spondylitis that's very severe along in the disease, patients present to the hospital bent over so far that their head is below their pelvis.

basically like very challenging to walk so that is a difficulty in just figuring it out you know where the disease is what levels need to be addressed it typically ends up being a four or five stage procedure where they start with hip replacements followed by lumbar PSO thoracic PSO cervical PSO And so how to position them on the table in a prone position when you can't even open them up and all of these things.

So a lot of surgery was being done lateral.

Can you imagine doing a lumbar PSO in a lateral position? Extremely challenging stuff.

But those are some cases that stood out.

And there's one surgeon in Shenzhen, Dr. Tao, that had a series of those cases And the most amazing thing about him is after he demonstrated one of those surgeries to us, he himself had surgery done on his knee.

He's not a folded man, of

course.

But he had surgery on his own body the day after.

So he kept delaying the surgery so that he would be available to show us what he's able to do.

And then underwent a pretty big surgery himself the next day.

So very impressive.

Yeah, same thing.

I think really if you look at it, we saw a lot of complex cases at the different cities.

Really what stands out as something that we don't come across a lot was that folded man.

Because we don't really see in the U.S. someone who has essentially gone to that extent of, in a way,

staged and limited i'm guessing in in these countries even though the expertise is there at the big center people who are further on the periphery just don't know how to access it as well as we probably do in the u.s

And we have a little bit of that problem in the U.S., but it sounds like it's a little bit more extensive in some areas of the world.

I don't think I've seen anyone to that extent, that their head is basically below their pelvis.

And it wasn't a one-off.

He said he had done about 50 cases of those.

So to have that number of patients with that very unique problem was impressive and definitely stands out.