Brian Butzen

Your Role in Recovery When patients ask what they can do to set themselves up for a good surgical outcome, they usually expect me to talk about the surgery itself. The technique. The implant. The rehab plan. Those matter — a lot. But one of the most underrated factors in how well you heal has nothing to do with what happens in the operating room. It's what you put into your body in the weeks before and after surgery. This is a practical breakdown of what your body needs to rebuild tissue,...

Your MRI says full-thickness supraspinatus tear—how serious is that? The answer depends on whether it's acute or degenerative, and what happens next if you don't have surgery.

The Counterintuitive Surgery When I explain CMC arthroplasty to patients with basal joint arthritis, I often see confusion cross their faces. We're going to remove a bone and not put anything in its place? It sounds like we're making the problem worse, not better. After years of knee replacement commercials and hip replacement success stories, patients reasonably expect that fixing a worn-out joint means installing new hardware. So why does thumb basal joint surgery—one of the most successful...