Meet you at the joint
Had trouble scheduling an appointment with an orthopedist toward the end of February, did you? Guess you didn't hear that almost a third of the country's 23,500 bone doctors would spend the waning days of the month in the nation's capital at their specialty's annual meeting. Counting physicians from abroad, 11,083 doctors flowed like white blood cells through the channels and spaces of the Washington Convention Center, busily digesting medical presentations and bumping up happily against old colleagues. But they didn't come just for the studies and camaraderie. They came to shop.
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons' annual bash isn't close to the biggest medical meeting of the year--the radiologists run that one--but it is a lucrative venue for companies looking to drum up business. This year at least 300,000 Americans will have a hip joint entirely or partly replaced, running up nearly $11 billion in hospital charges, based on 2002 cost data. More than 400,000 will have a knee replaced, billed at another $11 billion. All orthopedic procedures require a tool of some kind, whether it is a surgical instrument, imaging system, or office management software. And the number of painful hips, knees, shoulders, and other joints and muscles is headed straight up as baby boomers age.
Everybody wins. As the bone doctors made their way to Washington, D.C., 12,365 sales representatives, engineers, and executives lay in wait on the exhibit floor. Some of their 458 booths were huge and sprawling, costing $1 million or more. The edifice from Stryker Orthopaedics, a Mahwah, N.J., manufacturer of a broad range of products and devices, took five days to set up. Others, occupied by niche-fillers and up-and-comers, were little more than a 10-foot table, a backdrop, and yards of hunter-green cloth drapings.
Such medical bazaars are a win-win-win. From this one, the orthopedists' group collected roughly $6 million in exhibitor fees, amounting to about 15 percent of its annual operating budget. Attendees--not just doctors but hospital and clinic administrators, too--could audition new toys and tools more efficiently than back home, where they would have to schedule many meetings to hear individual presentations. And the entrepreneurs got a chance to woo, dazzle, and deal. In the orthopedic community, this was, as variety show host Ed Sullivan used to say, a really big shew.
Wandering through this medical melding of Costco and the Sharper Image is great fun for a non-M.D. observer. An hour or so of strolling also suggests, of all things, a sculpture garden. There is real beauty in the elaborate curves of a surgical tool designed to manipulate hidden muscle tissue. The plastic hips and knees and spines at many booths, props for new kinds of joints or supports, are clearly meant not only to be functional but to catch the eye. A booth sponsored by a manufacturer of joint replacements displays a partial hip made of translucent acrylic, joined by an artificial ball and socket to a matching leg bone. The construction glitters like an anatomic ice sculpture.
advertisement
