A short talk by Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter reflecting on his shift from high-volume orthopedic surgery toward regenerative and non-surgical approaches to optimize patient health and reduce unnecessary procedures. He highlights concerns about complications and a statistic that 25–30% of knee replacements may be premature, motivating interest in prevention and regenerative care.
I started to think about orthopedics as a holistic kind of discipline kind of midway through my career I was a high volume orthopedic surgeon. I'd been doing a lot of surgeries. Our outcomes were really good but I always wanted to get better and every complication is so devastating. You know you really change people's lives with these surgeries. And so I started to think, you know, what could we do to really optimize a patient's health before we do something. It's a horrible statistic but in this country we're doing more and more surgeries and about 25 to 30% of knee replacements are done what we would call prematurely which means maybe not as indicated as we would think think it's not really in stage arthritis. So there are a lot of options available to patients that aren't surgical and, and that's where I got interested in the regenerative type approach. Imagine if we could prevent you from needing to have an orthopedic surgery for, for years and years.
She Traveled from Colorado for a Different Approach to Knee Pain | Lois’ Story
