Experienced Orthopaedic Surgeon Explains in Plain English All You Need to Know About Arthritis and Midlife’s Aches and Pains

-- It’s about time an articulate, humorous orthopaedic surgeon with over 25 years experience explained in plain language how to handle all those midlife aches and pains. In his accessible new book, The Other Midlife Crisis: Arthritis and All Those Aches and Pains, Mayo Clinic-trained surgeon, Dr. Michael R. Wilson, sorts out the sanity from the snake oil for everything from back aches to carpal tunnel syndrome. With over 120 of his own drawings, and stories from his practice, Dr. Wilson explains how things work, how they go wrong and how they can be treated.

Dr. Wilson begins by presenting his own comical classification of The Syndromes of boomer orthopaedic patients. Illustrated with cartoons by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Walt Handelsman, Dr. Wilson presents the Risk-Takers, the Narcissus Syndrome, the Deconditioned and the Fear-of-becoming-a-fat-lady Syndromes. He systematically elucidates all the most common midlife complaints of every region—the spine, the shoulder, the hand…all the way down to the foot.

The nuts and bolts of arthritis, the current state of joint replacement surgery, the life-cycle of the wonder drug—it’s all here and all presented in Dr. Wilson’s unique voice. Who would think you’d wind up laughing out loud about knee cartilage problems, but you’ll do just that as you read his “parable of the lawyer and the laborer”, where he explains why sometimes arthroscopy helps knee pain and sometimes it doesn’t.

A busy full-time orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Wilson treats thousands of patients and performs over three hundred surgical cases yearly, including joint replacements, trauma and hand surgery. A diplomate and board examiner of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, Fellow of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, past president of the Society of Military Orthopaedic Surgeons, and recently inducted into the prestigious American Orthopaedic Association, Dr. Wilson is currently orthopaedic residency program director and Chairman of Graduate Medical Education at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans.

As he says in describing the deconditioned patient: “We may waver between guilt and determination, committing every now and then to a program of fitness and healthy living, but in the end entropy wins out and we slouch and snack our way in to big blobs of mostly fat and wind held together by anxiety.”

Most baby boomers will see themselves in these pages, and all will find answers to their questions about their aches and pains.