L4-5 Charite ADR Stenum

[james]

Charite’ polyethylene core 6.5 years after installation. From Complications and reoperations of the SB Charité lumbar disc prosthesis: experience in 75 patients

[mmglobal]

I just stumbled into this thread as I was updating kc0iet's thread on the surgical outcomes forum here:

L4-5 & L5-S1 Chartie Stenum - kc0iet

I'm bumping this one up for 2 reasons.... first because kc0iet's case and John's are related because they are part of the steady stream of truly unbelieveable Stenum errors.

Second, 3 years late, almost to the day, I have an anecdote related to the study posted by James, above.

In the past, when writing about the spine conferences, I have noted that there was an amazing number of papers from the same sources, that I characterized as anti-polyethylene anti-science. I coined the term anti-science to describe what Steven Kurtz and his organization were churning out. While there was likely some useful information developed in his studies, it truly seemed that Dr. Kurtz and Dr. Van Ooij received unlimited funding from medtronic to generate "polyethylene is bad" science. Much of what they reported on had to do with long-solved problems associated with early sterilization techniques and horrifically botched surgeries like the ones described above. I even asked him in the Q&A session after he presented a paper, "how is this relevant to what we are doing today" and his reply was, "it's not". (I'm paraphrasing)

IMHO, the spine societies seemed to give him a big platform in an effort to be fair, even though he got little respect. Last week, I sat next to a very prominent researcher (PhD biomechanics) and noted the absence of Dr. Kurtz. He told me about a conference in which a substantial percentage of the audience walked out as soon as Kurtz started to speak.

In any case, what I thought was amazing is that there was NO anti-polyethylene science presented (that I saw) and while Dr. Kurtz always had 5 or 6 papers to present at most of the previous conferences I attended, he was not here. Why? (IMHO) The Maverick was not FDA approved. Metal on metal joints are no longer in favor, so there is no longer any motivation for Medtronic to endlessly fund anti-poly anti-science. It seems that they were marketing pieces looking to create a competitive advantage.

It's truly amazing how the landscape changes... attending ISASS last week after missing the last 2 years... things were quite different. I'll be posting more about ISASS here:

ISASS 14, Miami Beach, April 30 - May 2 2014

Mark