Week Two

This week was began with more clinical work at Dr. Kennedy's office in HSS. At this point I feel much more comfortable talking to patients, trying to figure out what their issue is, and what a proper course of treatment would be. When I first began I was very hesitant to talk to the patients and I didn't have enough confidence in my knowledge to come up with a solution. However, Dr. Kennedy's explained to me that there are two major components to the issues that a patient present, a biological and mechanical component. Being that my background is in biomedical engineering I feel that it is much more natural for me to identify mechanical problems, such as improper bone alignment, and possible solutions. The biological component is a bit more difficult for me to understand since many treatments to biological issues, like PRP, are treatments that I've only heard of after beginning my time at HSS.

There were fewer surgeries that took place this week, however one of these surgeries was particularly hard for me to watch since I had never seen a case of osteomyelitis before. This infection had unfortunately caused the deterioration of two bones in her foot to the point that the bone had become completely soft. When the surgeries began the patient had swelling on her foot comparable to the size of a baseball, which turned out to be necrosed tissue. After all of the tissue had been removed there was a large hole in the foot that was filled with PMMA in order to prevent the infection from occupying the space. Since I have never actually seen PMMA in real life before I was surprised to learn that its hardening process was exothermic and caused it to heat up very noticeably. 

The last day of the week involved working at NYDG once again and observing PRP and shockwave therapy treatments. I was very excited since I was actually able to experience shockwave therapy firsthand. Back in December I injured my wrist boxing and while it healed to the point that it stopped causing me pain, it began to creak very loudly until I received this treatment. While I found shockwave to be very uncomfortable, I noticed that I received immediate relief from discomfort in my wrist. To be honest, I was very skeptical about the efficacy of the treatment but I'm happy to say that the treatment presents so many benefits with little to no risk. I would certainly encourage more doctors in the future to use this treatment since its applications go far beyond only orthopedic purposes.