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This is the article I wanted to go over for this newsletter. Something we really care about at Ortho Conditioning! Some of the points brought up in the article are obvious, but they are a good reminder for both mentors and mentees. You can check out the full article online: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34043604/

Coaching and advising can be helpful, but they are not what real mentorship is like. They are generally more one-way communication and typically do not last over the long term.. The description of mentorship is described as, “Mentors serve as role models, advocates, and friends”.

Current landscape of in orthopedic surgery mentorship

• Only ⅓ of medical students have access to a mentor

• In one study 84% of ortho surgeons at an academic residency said that their mentor was influential in selecting an orthopedic residency

• There are benefits to students, surgeons and institutions

  • Career counseling, professional development, personal growth, clinical knowledge and skills, prevention of burnout, opportunities for research

  • Increased research productivity, faculty career satisfaction, bolstered recruitment, improved educational performance, increasing diversity

Benefits of mentorship to all parties involved:

The article goes on to discuss some tactics for being an awesome mentee and mentor:

• For Mentees

  • Be respectful of their time

  • Find that balance of not under or over communicating

  • Periodically follow up with mentors to maintain a fluid relationship/ develop a long-lasting friendship (helps your mentor feel appreciated, helps them know they are having an effect)

  • Accept positive and negative feedback

  • Show interest by interacting in the ecosystem, Ortho interest groups, career advising offices, shadowing, speaker events, saw bone labs, splinting workshops, alumni networks, journal clubs, ground rounds, morning conferences. (Show passion, commitment and professionalism)

  • Help Mentors with research (follow through on commitments)

  • Present research, network with people

  • Networking approach

    • Start with alumni from your program or students farther along in your med school

    • Consider social media platforms (Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram)

    • Attend conferences

    • Take advantage of coordinated efforts at OrthoMentor, Ruth Jackson, J.Robert Gladden, Nth Dimension, OrthoConditioning (our website wasn’t in the article, this is just our shameless plug!)

  • When reaching out to future mentors

    • Be courteous and appreciative (even if they can’t help you, it may lead to future opportunities)

    • Find mentors with similar backgrounds

    • Research your mentors, know their backgrounds, research, anticipate questions, craft a compelling personal narrative

    • Keep your cold email short and to the point, don’t be afraid to send multiple polite follow up emails

• For mentors

  • Serve as support and guidance

  • Invest in individuals to understand their mentee’s backgrounds, interests, aspirations

  • Serve as an advocate for their mentees’ work ethic, personal qualities, growth over time

  • Recognize challenges that some med students are early in their career and may not be fully committed to orthopedics, or that some students decide late in medical school, unclear expectaions, time constraints and opportunity costs of mentorship activities

  • Set clear guidelines and expectations to better facilitate the process

  • Encourage and provide constructive feedback

  • Assist in seting lofty but practical short and long term goals

  • Model honesty, integrity, and high standards

#OrthoTwitter Highlights

Ortho News

Here is a case that inspired us to look up NuVasive’s Precise Bone Transport System.

NuVasive – Specialized Orthopedics, Inc.

NuVasive is a Company led by Chris Barry, Chief Executive Officer. The company supports surgeons with best-in-class technology and a highly trained clinical team that help enable improved patient outcomes with the vision “Change patient’s life every minute”. It is committed to advance less invasive surgery and integrate enabling technology in every procedure.

Precice Bone Transport system is one of the innovative solutions by NuVasive. It is the all-internal solution intentionally designed to treat segmental bone defects up to 10 cm. The built-in dual slot provides stability to support the transport of more complex segmental defects. The system also offers a simplistic approach for both surgeons and the patients. Hence, it is preferred by the latter as it is generally less painful, easier to manage physical therapy, and often offers improved cosmesis.

Available Styles of Precice Bone Transport system

• Antegrade femur piriformis straight

• Antegrade femur trochanter 10° bend

• Retrograde femur straight

• Antegrade tibia 10° bend

Tech, Investing, Entrepreneurship

What are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)?

A game-changing form of organization that will open up so many new opportunities for global collaboration and coordination; empowers online communities to deploy money in new, efficient, and egalitarian ways to achieve shared goals. It’s the ultimate combination of capitalism and progressivism. Entrepreneurs who enable DAOs can be successful if the community excels at governance, everyone shares in the benefits.

The DOAs work through smart contracts. The contract establishes the organization’s norms and safeguards the funds of the group. No one can change the rules after the contract is live on Ethereum until a vote is taken. It will fail if someone attempts to do something that isn’t covered by the code’s rules and logic. No one can spend the money without the permission of the organization. This eliminates the requirement for a central authority in DAOs. Instead, the group makes decisions together, and payments are automatically authorized when votes are passed.

The Billion User Table: The “Login” is the gateway to the internet, and it’s about to get decentralized (Link)

Is the login gateway to the internet and it is about to be decentralized. According to Jon Stokes, blockchain technology has the potential to move us away from a future where different firms create their own segregated user tables and toward a world where the entire Internet shares a single user table.

There is a single decentralized user data store accessible via an open protocol and a decentralized network of storage nodes, rather than a decentralized network of user data silos connected via APIs. Decentralization at the datastore implementation layer and recentralization at the datastore access layer are represented by the identity-hosting blockchain. Hence, the temptation to take advantage of blockchain-sized network effects will be so great, that companies will default to putting data on-chain rather than keeping it siloed.

However, the most important thing your users table does for you is provide you access to network effects, which offer you some lock-in. The more users your platform has, the more value it has for each individual user, and the more value it has for each individual user, the easier it is to recruit new users, and the more difficult it is for any one user to leave (since leaving means giving up everything).

The bottom line: By removing the prospect of users-table-centric network effects, completely up-ends the entire landscape of API-based protocols. The public blockchain amounts to a single, massive users table for the entire Internet, and the next wave of distributed applications will be built on top of it.