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Physician Profile Video: Charles Goldfarb, MD
Transcript:
I've chosen to focus my practice on the elbow, the forearm, the wrist and the hand and so whether it be a sports related injury to the elbow, a traumatic related injury to the elbow, fractures about the elbow or anything further down, so the forearms and hand, any of those types of injuries are what appeal to me and what I'm able to help patients best with.
An injury to the wrist can happen anytime. It can happen related to a fall. It can happen during a game or sporting event or it can happen using a drill at home or at work. It can be pain anywhere in the wrist but pain on the pinkie side of the wrist is actually more common and those problems can be difficult to identify and can be hard to treat. That's one of the benefits of looking inside the wrist with an arthroscopy set-up to identify the problem and treat it.
Not all the problems that I see need to be treated surgically and we try to avoid surgery when possible. We have a great relationship with occupational hand therapists. They're in our clinic and they help identify problems and help treat problems and we try to avoid surgery if possible. A great example of a treatment advance this minimally invasive is for Dupuytren's disease. Dupuytren's disease is a contracture which you see on the palm and it can bring the fingers down so they can't straighten out. So it used to be that when this became problematic enough and if therapy failed to improve the patient's status, we could take the patient to the operating room, make large incisions and take out the disease process. Now, we started treating patients in the office where we use a simple needle and we break up the scar tissue and in the office, we can make a dramatic difference for certain patients. And so that's an abnormality which is seen in an older patient, typically 50 to 70 years of age and is something that we've been very happy with the early minimally invasive results.
We feel the Orthopedic Center in Chesterfield is unique for a couple of reasons. First, the physicians practicing there, while they practice at Barnes Hospital also, they are treating patients with smaller issues. They can be safely treated in an outpatient environment. In that environment, we can treat more patients because we have a very efficient environment and we're constantly striving to improve the processes. So it's not simply we established a new center and we're going to rest on our laurels, but every time we see an opportunity for further improvement, we seize that opportunity. That's what I think has led us to continued improvement in our facility.
You know, I really love what I do and I think that's what makes it all enjoyable. I've enjoyed teaching and that becomes a part of my clinical practice, becomes a part of my research responsibilities. The effort actually is not as big as one might think when it's fun.
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