About Capital Health Summit
The moment it stopped being a nuisance and became a decision happened in a supermarket car park. I reached up to pull the boot shut and the arm jammed halfway, with a grinding that ran from the shoulder down to my elbow and did not care what I had swallowed for it that morning. By then I had spent the best part of a year sleeping propped upright in an armchair, because lying flat set the joint off within minutes.
I am Douglas Prentice, and Capital Health Summit came out of the months I then spent trying to work out what was wrong with that shoulder and what could actually be done about it.
Why this site exists
The problem was not finding information. It was finding information that answered the question in front of me. Clinic pages promised a fresh start; forums lurched between people back on the golf course and people who regretted the whole thing. What almost nobody set out plainly was the part that mattered to my particular shoulder: why a rotator cuff worn past repair meant a reverse replacement rather than a standard total, what the deltoid muscle would now be doing to lift my arm, how many weeks I would spend one-handed in a sling, and how many years an artificial shoulder holds before it might need doing again.
So I had the operation, kept notes the whole way through, and turned what I learned into these pages, working outward from my own reverse replacement.
What you will find here
I write about shoulder replacement in plain, specific language, starting from lived experience rather than a brochure:
- Shoulder replacement: the whole picture in one place, what it is, who it suits, and what it costs
- Anatomic versus reverse shoulder replacement, why the state of the cuff, not your age, tends to decide it
- Shoulder replacement recovery week by week, the sling, the first movements, and the slow settling over months
- How long a shoulder replacement lasts, why the “ten years” figure is a range rather than a promise
- Is a shoulder replacement worth it, the honest balance from the other side of it
I do not diagnose, I do not recommend particular surgeons or clinics, and I do not deal with anything urgent. Nothing here stands in for a surgeon who can examine your own shoulder and read your own scans.
Who keeps the medicine honest
The lived part of this site is mine: the armchair nights, the sling, the morning I reached a high shelf without thinking about it first. I am a patient, not a surgeon, so everything that touches the clinical side is gone over by Mr Robert Kessler, FRCS (Tr & Orth), a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, before it publishes. He weighs how the three operations are told apart, when a torn cuff points to a reverse, and the figures on recovery, durability, and complications. The way that division of labour works is set out in full in the Editorial Policy.
Talking to me
I would genuinely like to hear from anyone weighing up or recovering from a shoulder replacement. You can reach me through the Contact page. Please read the Medical Disclaimer as well: this site is general education and one man’s account, not advice about your own operation.