The catchy knee replacement name patients bring to the exam room has no published research behind it. Cory Calendine, an orthopedic surgeon who does 700 to 800 hip and knee replacements a year, explains where those names come from, what the surgical approach underneath them actually does, and why a promise a patient does not qualify for can slow down a real recovery.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:46 The patient who asked for a surgery she could not explain
2:02 The Facebook groups sending patients in with brand names
3:18 Subvastus will never fit on a billboard
4:05 Branded names now outrank Stryker and Zimmer in search
5:37 When a patient asks for a procedure she cannot have
6:44 Why false hope slows a real recovery
7:58 Less pain, faster recovery, back to work in a week
9:04 The hip approach where marketing ran ahead of the data
10:30 The branded knee procedures with zero published literature
11:50 Why he welcomes patients who show up with brand names
13:33 If everyone is back to work in a week, be skeptical
14:14 The stem cell claim that still has no evidence
15:03 Ask your surgeon why they do it that way
15:53 Take home messages

About this episode:
Cory Calendine is an orthopedic surgeon who performs nearly 700 to 800 hip and knee replacements a year, and he wrote about branded knee replacement marketing after a patient walked into his office using a trademarked procedure name correctly in a sentence without knowing what it meant. He traces the shift over the past five years from vague claims like minimally invasive to catchy proprietary names that now get searched more often than the implant companies making the hardware. The substance underneath many of them, he explains, is the subvastus approach, which goes under the muscle instead of cutting it and does have published data supporting faster recovery, while the branded names built on top of it have none of their own. He argues the harm is not the surgery but the expectation, because patient expectations track directly with how patients recover, and a patient whose hopes are set on a named procedure she does not qualify for can walk out with her morale lowered before the surgery even starts. He walks through the hip replacement parallel, where direct anterior marketing ran ahead of the evidence before the research eventually caught up, and through stem cells, where he says the evidence still is not there. Inside the exam room he takes the opposite approach from most, welcoming patients who arrive with their own research and starting from what they already believe rather than correcting them first. He closes with the questions any patient can ask out loud, why do you do it that way, how many have you done, and what are the other options, and with his own take home message that you are the master of your own health.

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