Monday, June 30, 2025

ChatGPT, the shoulder arthritis blog, and me

Many of us are curious about the utility of ChatGPT. I decided to put it to the test. I was recently asked if there was a way to summarize the 3000 posts on the Shoulder Arthritis Blog. I wondered whether ChatGPT could help.  Below is our conversation word for word. The whole conversation took less than 60 seconds.

Me: I have over 3000 posts on http://shoulderarthritis.blogspot.com can you help me summarize them by key word

ChatGPT: Here are some high-level key themes (keywords/topics) that emerge when reviewing your Shoulder Arthritis blog (with over 3,000 posts!):

ðŸĶī Common Keywords / Topics

  1. Reverse Total Shoulder Arthroplasty (rTSA)
  2. Ream-and-Run Procedure
  3. Rotator Cuff Pathology & Repair
  4. Periprosthetic Joint Infections (PJI)
  5. Glenoid Component Types
  6. Long-Term Follow-up Challenges
  7. Rehabilitation & Exercise Post-Arthroplasty
  8. Patient-Centered Perspectives
  9. Risk Factors in Shoulder Surgery
  10. FDA & Implant Safety

Proposed Workflow for Summarization

Given the blog’s volume, here’s a scalable approach:

  1. Content Harvesting
    • Export all blog post titles, dates, labels (tags), and preferably the full text (via Blogger API or web scraping) into a structured dataset.
  2. Text Processing
    • Tokenization and keyword extraction (e.g., TF-IDF, RAKE).
    • Topic modeling (LDA or BERTopic) to cluster posts into these themes.
  3. Quantitative Analysis
    • Count posts per topic over time (trend analysis).
    • List most-used keywords and their co-occurrence networks.
  4. Summaries & Visualization
    • Generate concise summaries for each theme (e.g., top-5 posts, key clinical recommendations).
    • Visualize trends with charts (volume by year, topic distribution).
  5. User Presentation
    • Provide an executive summary, keyword cloud, topic-trend graphs, and a way to drill down into specific themes/posts.

How I Can Help

I can assist you with:

  • Designing the full pipeline (scraping, NLP, visualization).
  • Writing scripts (in Python, R, etc.) to implement it.
  • Suggesting tools you might use (e.g., Gensim, spaCy, BERTopic).
  • Demonstrating a sample on a subset of posts.
  • Generating summarized output, like an Excel or HTML summary.

Would you like to:

  • Start with extracting titles/metadata?
  • Dive into one theme in detail first (e.g., rTSA outcomes)?
  • Or get a working prototype pipeline?

Let me know your preferred next step and I’ll tailor the workflow accordingly!


Me: rTSA outcomes


ChatGPT: Here’s a focused summary on reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (rTSA) outcomes based on the latest evidence:

📈 Functional Outcomes & Range of Motion

⚠️ Complication & Revision Rates

  • Primary rTSA (≥2 yr follow-up):
  • Mid to long-term (≥5 yr):
  • Longer-term registry data:
    • Scapular notching (grades I–II: 15–59%; III–IV: up to ~47%)
    • Functional stability maintained in most, though some studies report deterioration or increased late revisions (up to 23% in select cohorts) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

🔁 Revision rTSA

🏃 Return to Work & Sport

ðŸ§Đ Key Takeaways

  1. Primary rTSA delivers strong pain relief and functional improvement, with sustained motion gains.
  2. Complication and revision rates are modest short-term (~10% and <3%), increasing modestly over time.
  3. Revisions are challenging, with higher complication risk but meaningful functional benefits.
  4. Most patients resume sport and work, but recovery timelines depend on job/sport demands and psychosocial factors.

🔍 What’s Worth Monitoring

  • High rates of scapular notching—does it influence long-term glenoid stability or implant survival?
  • Long-term (>10 years) outcomes in larger registries as current data is limited.
  • Predictors of successful return to activity beyond ROM—considering psychological and occupational factors.


I hope you found this response interesting.


Keeping and eye on opportunity

 

Osprey 

Union Bay Natural Area

Seattle

June 2025


You can support cutting edge shoulder research that is leading to better care for patients with shoulder problems, click on this link

Follow on twitter/X: https://x.com/RickMatsen
Follow on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shoulder.arthritis
Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-matsen-88b1a8133/

Here are some videos that are of shoulder interest
Shoulder arthritis - what you need to know (see this link).
How to x-ray the shoulder (see this link).
The ream and run procedure (see this link).
The total shoulder arthroplasty (see this link).
The cuff tear arthropathy arthroplasty (see this link).
The reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (see this link).
The smooth and move procedure for irreparable rotator cuff tears (see this link)
Shoulder rehabilitation exercises (see this link).





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Sunday, June 29, 2025

How to access, follow and enjoy this blog

Welcome to the shoulder blog! This site is dedicated to the evaluation and management of patients with shoulder disorders. Started in 2011 it now contains more than 3,500 posts and has over 3,000,000 page views from over 100 countries. 

We are a non-commercial research and education program without support from any companies. As such, we highly value donations - small and large - from our readers, see this link or the link to the right

To help readers get the most out of the blog, let's do a bit of a walkthrough. 

At the top of each post, we show hotlinks to the blog posts visited most often in the prior week, ranked in order from the most popular, updated continuously. Just click on the name to see the post.


Below that on the left is the most recent post.


On the right you can see a link to a shoulder stretching program


a way to follow the blog


how to search the blog by key word


and links to popular posts
    



Near the bottom is one of my photos loosely related to the topic of the current post. 


Near the bottom are three other methods for following the blog

Follow on twitter/X: https://x.com/RickMatsen
Follow on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shoulder.arthritis

We hope this blog stimulates thoughtful discussion leading to progressively improvements in the care of patients disabled by shoulder disorders. 

Happy Shouldering

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Saturday, June 28, 2025

The pilot/the surgeon is the method

The outcome of a plane flight can be 

a routine landing (not news)

Or this
recent fatal crash of Air India flight (see news)

or this


an Airbus A320 flying from LaGuardia struck a flock of Canada geese shortly after takeoff, resulting in total engine failure. Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger guided the powerless plane into the Hudson River—fully intact—and all 155 people on board survived (see news)

Learning from adverse outcomes requires consideration of the plane and external factors (e.g. geese). But from the moment the plane takes off, the pilot is the method. 

When we do studies of surgical outcomes, we commonly study patient and implant characteristics, as in the very important study Risk Factors of Acromial and Scapular Spine Stress Fractures Differ by Indication: A Study by the ASES Complications of Reverse Shoulder Arthroplasty Multicenter Research Group, a study that sought to determine patient factors associated with cumulative acromial and scapular spine fractures in 4764 reverse total shoulder arthroplasties performed for patients with diagnoses of arthritis, cuff tear arthropathy and massive rotator cuff tears by 24 surgeon members of the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons
Stress fractures were identified in 1 of 50 patients with osteoarthritis and 1 of 20 patients with cuff tear arthropathy or massive rotator cuff tears. In the osteoarthritis group, inflammatory arthritis was associated with an increased risk of fracture. In the cuff tear arthropathy/massive rotator cuff tears group, inflammatory arthritis, female sex, and osteoporosis were associated with increased risk of fracture.

When a plane prepares for takeoff, the pilot is the method. When a surgical procedure begins, the surgeon is the method. In spite of the fact that the surgeon is a major determinant of the outcome, the "surgeon effect" is rarely studied.  

The authors of the study referenced above are in a powerful position to compare outcomes (stress fracture rates, revision rates, patient reported comfort and function) among the 24 surgeons: if indeed there were 4764 cases, the average case volume/surgeon was 200 cases! How variable were the outcomes among surgeons? How much of this variability was due to differences in surgical indication? If surgical indication was an incomplete predictor of the variability among surgeons, what other factors might have been in play? What can we learn from inter-surgeon differences in practice and outcome, i.e. noise?

Hopefully, this study group will consider adding "the surgeon effect" to their research.


After take off, the eagle is the method


Bald Eagle
Leavenworth, WA
April 2025

You can support cutting edge shoulder research that is leading to better care for patients with shoulder problems, click on this link

Follow on twitter/X: https://x.com/RickMatsen
Follow on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shoulder.arthritis
Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-matsen-88b1a8133/

Here are some videos that are of shoulder interest
Shoulder arthritis - what you need to know (see this link).
How to x-ray the shoulder (see this link).
The ream and run procedure (see this link).
The total shoulder arthroplasty (see this link).
The cuff tear arthropathy arthroplasty (see this link).
The reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (see this link).
The smooth and move procedure for irreparable rotator cuff tears (see this link)
Shoulder rehabilitation exercises (see this link).




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