“So, I grew up in Central Wisconsin and like many others in a small town, I had the opportunity to play several sports. And so, like many other orthopedic surgeons, my introduction to this field of medicine was through personal experience with a sports injury. I later attended UW Madison for medical school. In my final year there, I was working with an orthopedic surgeon, and we were caring for a patient with a hip fracture, and I remember that the surgeon told that patient, “we are in the business of mobility”. That phrase still resonates so strongly with me. We find that the ability to move about the world, to be able to move and have mobility without pain, is so integral to many aspects of our health and really our overall well-being. I find this especially true when we’re talking about the role of hip and knee replacement surgery to treat severe osteoarthritis. In many cases, we can give patients back decades of mobility with that surgery.”

“I often tell my patients that I treat the patient, not the X-ray. What that means is when I see you in clinic, we’re going to spend the time together to understand where your pain is coming from. We’re going to try to figure out how that’s affecting your day-to-day life, and then we’re going to bring that all together and develop a treatment plan that’s really addressed at whatever your unique goals are. Be that returning to a sport, getting back to work, or even just maintaining independence as you’re getting older.”

“Absolutely! So, we really tailor this to the patient. We’re looking at what their specific case of arthritis is and determine what’s going to be the right treatment option. I’d say the most frequent surgery that I perform is total hip and total knee replacement. Which means that we’re taking all the cartilage surface out of that joint and replacing it with those metal and plastic components. And that’s the right answer for the vast majority of people. In many cases, I’m performing those surgeries with robotic assistance which means that I have an extra level of precision and accuracy when I’m doing the surgery, to make sure that we get the result that the patient’s looking for. However, in some cases, patients really only have arthritis limited to one part of the joint. The rest of their joint is still in excellent quality, and I anticipate it’ll never wear out. And so, in those cases, I think a partial knee replacement or partial joint replacement can be the right answer for those patients.”

“Yeah, that’s a great question! I’m glad you asked. So, when we look at the process for hip and knee replacement recovery, that has really become streamlined over the last 10 years. Um previously patients would stay in the hospital for several days, even up to a week sometimes, um and now we’ve been able to find that we can get patients home the same day or the following day. What that has allowed us to do is take hip and replacement surgery, hip and knee replacement surgery, out of the hospital and move it to the Ambulatory Surgery Center. That translates to a safer and more efficient recovery process for the patient. So, just for example, when we talk about the infection rate that we see in our Surgery Center, that that rate is published at 0.15%. And just to kind of make that number make sense, that’s 15 times lower than the rate you might see with a hospital performed surgery um and even six times lower when compared to other surgery centers. So, we really are providing some of the safest care available. Additionally, we were recently recognized by both Newsweek and US News and World reports as having one of the best surgery centers in America. And so, you really can know, when you’re having your surgery done at one of our surgery centers, that it’s the safest and highest quality care that you can get.”