We presented a poster on our experience in 24 patients who had recurrent ventral hernias, but who had had a prior bioprosthetic mesh repair. Most of the patients were repaired successfully with prosthetic mesh.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/bionic-arm-means-battle-wounded-warrior/story?id=18592011
I just spent the weekend at the Association des Specialistes en Chirurgie Plastique et Esthetique du Quebec, in Montreal Canada. It was a wonderful weekend at the Esterel resort, guest of Professor Lessard and the other members of the association. I spoke about abdominal wall reconstruction, and the use of nerve transfers for management of painful neuromas. I even got to travel 30 km by snowmobile!
Pitt Medicine Article
The Abdominal Wall Meeting in Washington DC will bring together up to 1000 surgeons who perform abdominal wall reconstruction. I will give two lectures. The first is on the role of synthetic meshes in hernia repair. The other is on soft tissue flaps as an aid to complex abdominal wall reconstruction. I will also participate in a 2 hour panel entitled “stump the experts”. It should be fun!
At the national plastic surgery meeting, I will help give a course on abdominal wall reconstruction with Dr. Chuck Butler and Dr. Gordan Lee. My topics are the use of prosthetic mesh, and the treatment of infected mesh. I have two paper presentations as well. One paper is on plastic surgeon “burn-out” and the factors related to it. The other is on my results of prosthetic mesh use in 100 consecutive patients.
I participated with Dr. Alex Shin at the 2011 ASSH meeting in Las Vegas, and gave a course on management of symptomatic neuromas.
I gave three presentations at the 33rd European hernia society meeting in Ghent, Belgium in May 2011. One was a panel debate on the proper treatment of the open abdomen. A second was a presentation on my results of 100 consecutive intraabdominal mesh cases. The third was on the overuse of bioprosthetic mesh. The presentations led to much discussion amongst the group of European general surgeons.
