Robotic Shoulder Replacement: Is It Actually Better? | Dr. Mark Mighell

What do you think is one of the biggest advantages to doing robotic assisted shoulder replacement rather than the traditional technique?

You know, there's, I mean, it depends on who you're asking for.

So what we know about surgeons, there was a study and Mario Menendez is at Davis and looked at like the mental stress of surgeons.

When we put traditionally the glenoid in, you know, and if you're trying to see how people's, you know, if you're wearing one of the bands or you're monitoring heart rates and everything, that's a very stressful part of the surgery.

With the robot, that's gone.

There's no mental stress because you know the robot's going to get it right every time.

It's going to be perfect.

So you don't have to worry.

I think that for the patient, we need more data.

I could get up here today and tell you that me putting it perfect means it's going to last longer.

I don't know that.

I believe that.

I think we'll find out in 10 years.

But right now, as I sit here with these two guys, I don't know the answer to that.

But I can't imagine that if you don't put it exactly where you planned it and you took off exactly the amount of bone you wanted... and you balance everything perfectly, that it won't last longer.

I think that's a given.

And we'll have to prove that.

And the other thing the Mako does that's fascinating is it retains all the data.

So you can look back at your pre-op plan and then look at the post-op plan, and then we'll learn where the best place to put it on the bone is, what the best offsets, and these are terms that we use in surgery just to figure out like positioning and space, but spatial orientation of your implant, affects muscle forces and how things behave.

So it's fascinating, but that will come with time.

And the Mako allows us to capture that data.

And we're in a society now that data drives business analysis and everything else.

And we don't know about longevity, but we do know that the position helps with our emotion.

this is whenever we pre-op plan if we all go through we pre-op plan with ct scans and we will make millimeter and less than millimeter changes less than one degree changes on a pre-op plan to try to give you the best possible motion and there's some data out there that was a bench study that you were a part of that looked at well how accurate is a senior surgeon compared to the robotics And it was drastically better.

We're talking within one degree.