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Sports medicine doctor volunteer teaches advanced knee, shoulder arthroscopy skills
His Arthroscopy Worldwide international training program is unique in the orthopedic community.
Teaching knee and shoulder arthroscopy in developing parts of the world and coordinating everything needed to conduct that kind of training suits Steven W. Meier, MD, well. He enjoys helping others learn new arthroscopy skills or improve their current skills, and he likes to keep busy.
“In this field it’s really important to be progressive and keep up. If I just stayed at home all the time, I don’t know how I’d do it. This just seems more normal to me,” said Meier, of the Center for Progressive Sports Medicine, Orange, Calif.
In 2003 Meier established Arthroscopy Worldwide, an organization involving an ever-changing group of volunteers who travel internationally to teach advanced arthroscopic surgery techniques.
Meier makes the arrangements for his group to travel the world to train interested physicians at their local hospitals, as long as they have some of the basic infrastructure with which to work.
His calendar looks like a page out of a Condé Nast Traveler: March 2006: Germany; June 2006: Japan; February 2007: Brazil; May 2007: Egypt.
Later this year or early next year a new arthroscopic learning center will open in Bangkok, Thailand that can accommodate his courses, Meier said. He expects arthroscopic surgeons from surrounding countries like Malaysia and Korea to attend courses at the new center, including cadaver workshops, a rarity in many parts of the world outside the United States.
“Bangkok is one of the few places overseas where cadavers can be obtained and utilized,” Meier told Orthopedics Today, adding that Arthroscopy Worldwide volunteers will go there a few times in the coming months.
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Support from others
In the last four years, Meier has gone on 15 to 20 teaching trips and has sometimes scrubbed in during procedures his students have performed. And, that does not include the countless times he traveled around the world just to lecture at medical conferences.
To keep Arthroscopy Worldwide running smoothly, he often enlists help from his brother Jeffrey Meier, DO, an orthopedic resident in Chicago, and Francesca Mercado, a surgical technician from New Jersey who comes on many trips as an OR technician.
Companies like Arthrotek and DePuy Mitek, which just acquired Future Medical Systems, a French company that manufactures arthroscopic fluid management systems, also help make the organization’s trips possible.
They provide much-needed implants, instruments, equipment, monitors and arthroscopes.
“If you have any one of those components missing it can make the whole thing really difficult,” Meier said.
“Occasionally I’ll have some key instruments or custom instruments that I’ll bring in myself.”
Meier has had to improvise on a few of these trips. One hospital they visited in Egypt, for example, did not have a fluid pump.
The solution: OR staffers took turns holding fluid bags and squeezing them for the two-hour-long procedure.
Other than that, he has not encountered any major obstacles. “Maybe I’ve been lucky so far,” he said.
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Bridges gaps
DePuy Mitek’s worldwide presence has helped considerably. If they have a sales representative in the country where Meier plans to be next, he usually works with that individual to obtain all the instruments and implants needed for the upcoming training.
“It’s a growing market, so industry will usually do as much as possible to facilitate a visit, which is tremendously helpful to us.”
Meier advises the surgeons he trains about how to prepare themselves to handle a regular load of advanced arthroscopy procedures, sometimes helping them decide which pieces of essential equipment to purchase first.
“For shoulder arthroscopy, the one thing that’s really important is the fluid pump, which has an expense associated with it. But of the limited resources they have, that’s probably worth putting resources in to.”
Arthroscopy Worldwide offers other kinds of assistance, too. For example, volunteers like Mercado, who is multilingual, help translate the equipment’s instructional literature, which is often in English, into the doctors’ native language.
“That’s one of the gaps that we help bridge.”
Meier encourages newly trained surgeons to further their skills through more advanced courses offered by their national arthroscopy or orthopedic societies, or by device manufacturers.
“In terms of continuing education, there are a lot of opportunities out there for these surgeons to pursue.”
Meier is a proponent of medical volunteering, which he has done for about 14 years.
“It’s probably a great experience for anyone in their medical training to do.”