“The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory and foundational understanding, you don't have them in a usable form. You've got to have models in your head.”
As a trainee, I found that the hardest part of learning orthopedics was knowing what to read. There are thousands of articles in orthopedics, and more are published every week. No one can read them all, so the real question was which ones mattered.
Rather than trying to keep up with the newest articles, I went back to the beginning. I read the work of Codman, Charnley, Neer, Letournel, and the other surgeons who laid the groundwork for modern practice. Those papers taught me the history of the field. More importantly, they gave me a framework for understanding the newer literature: the latticework Munger describes above.
The other problem was practical. The articles that mattered were scattered. A landmark paper might be in one journal, the follow-up study in another, and the review that tied them together somewhere else. When I was preparing a presentation or studying an unfamiliar topic, I often did not know where to begin, and I kept rebuilding the same reading list from scratch. So I started keeping my own lists, organized chronologically, with the key findings from each article. Orthopedic Index is what those lists became.
It is not meant to be a comprehensive database. Any search engine can provide that. Instead, it distills the literature down to the most essential articles, organized by subspecialty and topic, so that whatever you are studying, there is a clear place to start. My goal is a resource that helps trainees navigate and understand the literature. It is free to use, and I hope to keep it that way.
Thank you for visiting the site. I hope you find it helpful.
Please pass along any feedback or concerns to brad@orthopedicindex.com.
Brad Roepke, M.D.
Admin, Orthopedic Index