October Offshore
Late October offshore fishing is some of the most productive of the year — and some of the most physiologically demanding. The combination of highly active fish, unpredictable weather, and cold water creates a specific risk profile that rewards preparation.
Distal Biceps Rupture
The decision to repair a distal biceps tendon rupture involves a clear biomechanical rationale, a well-defined time window, and a risk-benefit calculation that differs significantly by patient age and functional demand.
You Felt a Pop in Your Biceps
A pop in the biceps with sudden pain and visible deformity is one of the clearest injury presentations in orthopaedics — and one of the most time-sensitive. Where the tendon ruptured determines whether and how urgently you need surgery.
The Resistance Training Dose: Part 2
Having established how much training drives adaptation, the questions that follow are which exercises, in what order, and whether the load comes from a barbell, a cable, or a stack. The evidence is more nuanced than the culture wars around this topic suggest.
Frozen Shoulder
Adhesive capsulitis is one of the most self-limiting conditions in orthopaedics — and one of the most undertreated. Understanding the phase-specific biology changes both the conversation about prognosis and the rationale for intervention.
Hip Pain That Won't Go Away
Groin and anterior hip pain is among the most frequently misdiagnosed musculoskeletal complaints. The anatomy is complex, the pathologies overlap, and the consequences of missed diagnosis range from prolonged disability to avoidable surgical delay.
Resistance Training Part 1
The exercise science literature has converged on surprisingly specific recommendations for resistance training volume, frequency, and intensity. Most people are doing too little, some are doing too much, and almost everyone is using the wrong metric to measure either.
Achilles Tendinopathy
The Achilles tendon does not respond to rest. It responds to load — specifically, to the right kind of progressive, controlled mechanical loading delivered consistently over weeks. This is the physiology behind one of the most evidence-supported protocols in sports medicine.
Knee Pain Going Down Stairs
Pain specifically with descending stairs is one of the most diagnostically informative symptoms in knee evaluation. The pattern alone narrows the differential considerably — and tells you whether this is a monitoring situation or an evaluation situation.
The Fall Offshore Transition: What Changes When the Water Cools
October is the month the Carolina offshore environment stops behaving like summer. The fish move, the weather shifts, and the safety calculus changes in ways that catch people off guard every year.
Rotator Cuff Tears
A rotator cuff tear is a category, not a diagnosis. Where you fall on the spectrum — from tendinosis to massive rupture — determines everything about what happens next.
Shoulder Pain Reaching Overhead
Most shoulder pain with overhead activity is a mechanical problem. Some of it is a structural one. The difference is in the details — and the details are findable without imaging.
Golfer’s Elbow
Golfer's elbow and tennis elbow are the same pathological process — tendon degeneration from repetitive overload — on opposite sides of the joint. The rehabilitation principles are identical, the exercises are mirror images of each other, and yet medial epicondylitis gets a fraction of the clinical attention its lateral counterpart does.
Tennis Elbow
Most patients treated for lateral epicondylitis have never picked up a racquet. It's a repetitive-load tendon injury, not an inflammatory one — which is exactly why rest alone doesn't fix it, and why the real treatment looks different than most people expect.
Ganglion Cyst Myths
The 'Bible bump' got its name from people striking these wrist cysts with a heavy book — a folk remedy that sometimes works and usually doesn't need to be attempted at all. Here's what actually determines whether one needs treatment.
Frozen Shoulder
Adhesive capsulitis has a strange, predictable arc — it often gets stiffer before it gets better, and the whole course can run over a year. Knowing that timeline up front is sometimes the most useful thing a patient can hear at diagnosis.
Cubital Tunnel Syndrome
Numbness in the ring and pinky finger gets blamed on 'sleeping wrong' far longer than it should. The nerve involved doesn't distinguish between a bump on the funny bone and months of chronic compression — and by the time there's real weakness, recovery gets a lot less reliable.
CMC Basal Joint Arthritis
Pain at the base of the thumb usually starts small — a jar lid, a car key, a firm handshake. For a lot of patients it's the most common form of hand arthritis, and it's also one of the most treatable if it's caught before it limits daily function.
Skier’s Thumb
A fall onto the thumb usually gets waved off as a sprain. Enough of the time it's actually a torn ligament — and the two look identical for the first 48 hours. Here's the exam that tells them apart, and why the window to fix it matters.
Alaska After-Action: What the Framework Got Right and What It Missed
Eleven days in the Inside Passage tested the safety framework built across ten issues of this column. Here is the honest debrief — what performed as designed, what needed real-time adjustment, and what the field taught us that paper planning could not.