AOSpine

InSpine No. 3 / 08 is out now, looking at issues of professional conduct: AOSpine members Ziya Gokaslan, Ma Xin, and Alexandre Sadao Iutaka offer their thoughts on addressing incompetence in coworkers. The views of Dr. Charles Rosen, the founder of the Association for Ethics in Spine Surgery might well be illuminating! And it may come as a surprise to find out how many doctors not only prescribe, but also take drugs. A feature on spinal cord monitoring and a commented case report on spinal osteochondroma give new surgical insights.

AOSpine and the EANS welcome you to Strasbourg

As part of their ongoing collaboration to provide excellence in spine education, and in recognition of the need for specific training directed at the management of vascular, visceral, and dural injuries particular to spine surgery, AOSpine Europe and the EANS are proud to once again present the live tissue training course: Complications in Spine Access Surgery - Complication avoidance and management strategies.

Olympic Games: what makes better athletes

The world-record pace for the marathon continues to improve for both men and women. For men, the record pace for the marathon is now about as fast as the record pace for the 10,000-meter run just after World War II. Today, champion athletes are running more than four times farther at speeds of well under five minutes per mile.

How can this be? Are humans simply built better or is there something else behind the mind-blowing speeds on the racetrack?

Communication is key to ease patients' worry about surgery

A study published in the July 2008 issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery found that patients age 60 or older have many concerns and questions that they do not mention to their orthopedic surgeons, which, in turn can become a barrier to obtaining optimal care.

Physicians targeted by Medtronic whistleblowers

The rumors were rampant throughout the orthopedics industry the last two weeks that a couple of hundred surgeons were about to be indicted.
Turns out, that wasn’t true. What did happen, however, was that a whistleblower lawsuit had been unsealed in Boston that named 136 spine surgeon and distributors doing business with Medtronic Spine as defendants and accused them of violating the False Claims Act and promoting off-label use of INFUSE™.

AOSpine–Complications & controversies course

In 2008, the year that AO Foundation turns 50 and AOSpine celebrates its 5th anniversary, AOSpine Latin America has decided to celebrate this with an important event in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires: a Course of Complications and Controversies, something extremely useful for surgeons’ daily practice.

New lecture webcasts online

We’re pleased to announce that a total of 41 new lecture webcasts are now available on the AOSpine website. The lectures, which were filmed during the Davos courses in December, cover a variety of topical subjects.