And I thought we were done with the mid-shaft clavicle….

Bicycle

Bicycle injuries are by far the most common mechanism of injury for clavicle injuries. The image is CC by Hiroyuki Takeda.

So… just a few days after my previous clavicle post, Ahrens et al released their multi-center study on 300 patients randomized to surgery. They found that operated clavicles have less pain early on, but that after 9 months they perform the same. The study was excellently performed with 20 centers, adequate patient selection, random block permutation for treatment allocation, and reasonable treatment options. Continue reading

The clavicle fracture – can the madness finally come to an end?

Finding the right path can be harder than we want to think . The image is CC by Gwenole Camus.

In the early 2000s Nowak et al. [1] shattered the belief that mid-shaft clavicle fractures always healed fine; even after 10 years almost half of the patients had remaining symptoms*. This common injury had also by in others [2] (with shorter follow-ups) been hinted as problematic, and within short we were showered with fancy new implants. After ≥ 7 RCTs [3], [4] on the subjects it seems that these new implants failed do deliver. Can we finally start questioning if surgery is the solution? Continue reading