In 1980 everyone wanted to do knees. Des Bokor asked his mentor Merv Cross whether he should too, and Merv said: you and twenty other people just like you. Do something nobody else wants to do, and the world will be your oyster.

What nobody wanted was the shoulder. Colleagues called it difficult, awkward, a joint you could not get good results from. So he went to North America, spent a fellowship with Rich Hawkins in London Ontario and time with Frank Jobe at the Kerlan Jobe Clinic, and came home to a country where there was effectively no shoulder surgery at all.

He had done exactly one rotator cuff repair in his entire training, with David Sonnabend, in 1980. There were no anchors. Diagnosis was a plain film and an arthrogram, and if the dye leaked out, that was your cuff tear.

From there: founding the Shoulder and Elbow Society of Australia with Sonnabend when barely a dozen surgeons turned up. More than three and a half thousand shoulder stabilisations, and a practice full of Wallabies and league players that led him to the HAGL lesion. Being the first person in the world to implant Regeneten into a human being, a collagen patch that has since gone into a quarter of a million shoulders. Sitting in New York in the early 1990s watching Paul Grammont present the reverse replacement and thinking the man was totally crazy.

And before any of it, hanging off a winch line down a cliff as a CareFlight rescue doctor, putting a chest tube into an unconscious girl.

Chapters

  • 00:00 "This man is totally crazy"
  • 01:08 Welcome
  • 02:10 Going to North America in 1980
  • 03:15 Merv Cross: do what nobody else wants to do
  • 04:20 The seminar that changed his mind
  • 05:00 The fellowship with Rich Hawkins
  • 05:40 Repairing cuffs open, with no anchors
  • 06:06 Diagnosing a tear before MRI
  • 07:00 Frank Jobe, instability, and operating flat
  • 08:49 Monash, and deciding at twelve to be a surgeon
  • 10:30 From plastic surgery to orthopaedics
  • 11:50 CareFlight and the rescue helicopter
  • 12:40 Winched down a cliff
  • 13:41 Sandy, and an unfunded fellowship
  • 15:00 Founding the Shoulder and Elbow Society
  • 16:48 HAGL lesions, and 3500 stabilisations
  • 18:50 Why rugby was a boon for shoulder surgery
  • 19:55 Regeneten and the problem of cuff healing
  • 21:12 The first Regeneten implant in a human
  • 23:30 A quarter of a million implants
  • 24:30 Teaching himself the arthroscopy revolution
  • 28:07 Hawkins, Jobe and Sonnabend
  • 28:51 When shoulder replacement had a bad reputation
  • 31:25 The limits of anatomic replacement
  • 32:26 Reverse arthroplasty arrives
  • 34:53 Why anatomic still belongs in the armamentarium
  • 35:40 The next frontier is biology
  • 36:56 The closed chain, and posture
  • 38:30 Teaching in Cambodia after Pol Pot
  • 40:39 Going in to make themselves redundant
  • 41:30 Ten years on the Court of Examiners
  • 43:00 Subspecialisation and the future of training
  • 44:22 What shoulder surgery taught him about people
  • 46:50 The three month review, and expectations
  • 47:08 We do not save lives, we give people their life back
  • 49:11 Proudest moments
  • 49:49 Closing