Inside The Shoulder

About Inside The Shoulder

Inside the Shoulder is a podcast hosted by orthopaedic shoulder surgeon Dr. Kenneth Cutbush, exploring real stories from people across all industries. Each episode dives into life journeys, career paths, achievements, setbacks and the lessons learned along the way. Alongside these conversations, Dr. Cutbush breaks down shoulder health, injury, recovery and surgery in a clear, practical way. It’s an honest mix of human stories and medical insight designed to educate and inspire.

Publisher

Dr. Kenneth Cutbush

Category

health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Jan 2026

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

24 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   "I Thought This Man Was Totally Crazy" | Prof Des Bokor

   In 1980 everyone wanted to do knees. Des Bokor asked his mentor Merv Cross whether he should too, and Merv said: you and twenty other people just like you. Do something nobody else wants to do, and the world will be your oyster. What nobody wanted was the shoulder. Colleagues called it difficult, awkward, a joint you could not get good results from. So he went to North America, did a fellowship with Rich Hawkins in London Ontario and spent time with Frank Jobe at the Kerlan Jobe Clinic, and came home to a country where there was effectively no shoulder surgery at all. He had done exactly one rotator cuff repair in his entire training, with David Sonnabend, in 1980. There were no anchors. Diagnosis was a plain film and an arthrogram, and if the dye leaked out, that was your cuff tear. What followed was a career that built the specialty in this country. Founding the Shoulder and Elbow Society of Australia with Sonnabend, when barely a dozen surgeons turned up and most of their colleagues did not believe you could make a living in shoulders. More than three and a half thousand stabilisations, and a practice full of Wallabies and league players that led him to the HAGL lesion. Being the first person in the world to implant Regeneten into a human being, a collagen patch that has since gone into a quarter of a million shoulders. And sitting in a room in New York in the early 1990s, watching Paul Grammont present the reverse shoulder replacement, and thinking the man was completely mad. "We did not see what he could see." Before any of it, he was hanging off a winch line down the side of a cliff as one of the original CareFlight rescue doctors, putting a chest tube into an unconscious girl. Inside The Shoulder is hosted by Associate Professor Kenneth Cutbush, a specialist orthopaedic shoulder surgeon in Brisbane, Australia. IN THIS EPISODE 03:15 Merv Cross: do what nobody else wants to do 05:00 The fellowship with Rich Hawkins 07:00 Frank Jobe, instability, and operating flat 08:49 Deciding at twelve to be a surgeon 11:50 CareFlight, and being winched down a cliff 15:00 Founding the Shoulder and Elbow Society 19:55 Regeneten and the problem of cuff healing 32:26 Reverse arthroplasty arrives 44:22 What shoulder surgery taught him about people 49:11 Proudest moments

2. 

   24 Sept 2026

   The Operation Everyone Said Would Never Work | Prof David Sonnabend

   In 1981 a rotator cuff repair was regarded as an impossible operation. When David Sonnabend presented a case at the weekly meeting at Royal North Shore, senior colleagues told him not to bother. It never works. Give them some steroids and send them on their way. His patient was a little Italian stonemason whose entire cuff had come away. Without a repair the man's trade was finished and his family was in trouble. Sonnabend and his first registrar, Des Bokor, read up an approach that had been described in England, reattached the cuff slowly, and the man went back to work. Every year for the next twenty years, until he died, a dozen bottles of red wine arrived. Years earlier, a young consultant at a small district hospital had been handed the patient nobody else would touch. The Health Minister's mother, a shattered shoulder, an operation he had never seen performed. He read what literature there was, then picked up the phone and called New York. Charles Neer, the father of shoulder surgery, talked him through it down the line while Sonnabend sat in his lounge room with three textbooks and a notepad. He never did a fellowship. He did one of the first reverse shoulder replacements in Australia without having seen one. He founded the Shoulder and Elbow Society of Australia with Des Bokor by rewriting the Knee Society constitution. He designed the retractor that carries his name, and an oval glenoid reamer that a major implant company bought and shelved. Ask him what mattered most and it is not the papers. It is the more than fifty surgeons he trained. I did not have a wife in orthopaedics, he says, but the younger guys became a family. IN THIS EPISODE 02:13 The phone call to Charles Neer 06:47 Indonesia, and real pathology 08:06 The fellowship that fell through 10:49 Three months with Charles Neer 13:00 One of the first rotator cuff repairs in Australia 15:10 One of Australia's first reverse shoulder replacements 18:17 If in doubt, don't 20:42 Why training surgeons mattered most 24:38 The 1998 congress in Sydney 27:33 The oval reamer that got shelved 32:27 Advice to his younger self 33:40 There's no condition that surgery can't make worse Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dwI7OE5XcNk Inside The Shoulder is hosted by Associate Professor Kenneth Cutbush, a specialist orthopaedic shoulder surgeon in Brisbane, Australia.

3. 

   8 Sept 2026

   Prof Christian Gerber: Try To Become A Man Of Value

   At sixteen, flat on his back in traction with a broken neck, Christian Gerber started collecting quotations. One was Einstein: try not to become a man of success, try to become a man of value. Fifty eight years later he says that line still governs how he works. Finding out that something doesn't work isn't a success, but it is value. Professor Christian Gerber is the most decorated shoulder surgeon alive. Four Neer Awards. The Kappa Delta. Twenty two years as chairman of Balgrist in Zurich. Ask him what drives him and the answer is flat: no particular talent, just curiosity. He was going to be a professional footballer, and captained Switzerland's national youth side. Then he dove into shallow water and dislocated his cervical spine. It was missed at first, and doctor after doctor said the same thing. Don't touch it. He could end up tetraplegic. Twenty weeks passed in traction. Then the family were sent to Professor Maurice Müller, because people said he was a magician. This was 1968. When Gerber's father raised the warnings, Müller looked the sixteen year old in the eye and told him that if it were going to happen it would have happened in the accident, not in surgery. "You are not planned to become tetraplegic." The fear left him instantly, and he calls it the first time he understood the power a physician holds. Afterwards Müller charged a thousand Swiss francs and made a different kind of deal with the boy: that he would give back to orthopaedics what orthopaedics had given him. He trained under Müller, then Reinhold Ganz, then Charles Rockwood in Texas. There's a question in here that shows how differently he thinks. Roger Federer served a thousand times a day for two decades and never had shoulder pain. We say 40% of rotator cuffs are torn by 60, but nobody asks why the other 60% aren't. Orthopaedic research begins at the moment treatment starts, and by then, he argues, it's already too late. In 1991 he described the subscapularis tear, which nobody had thought about. The first sixteen cases were so unusual he photographed every one. The American journal wrote back saying it was probably a Swiss disease and didn't occur in the United States. The British journal published it. The lift off test that came out of that work is now performed in every shoulder clinic in the world, and he hates that it carries his name. He talks about Dominic Meyer, the most brilliant colleague he ever had, who developed motor neurone disease and died at fifty leaving four children, and the award he created in his memory to fund research that actually disrupts something. And he explains a line that sounds like arrogance until you hear the reasoning. He has never had a bad result in his life, and never a good one. His patients have. Recorded in Brisbane, the day before he scrubbed in to operate. Inside The Shoulder is hosted by Associate Professor Kenneth Cutbush, a specialist orthopaedic surgeon practising exclusively in shoulder surgery in Brisbane, Australia. New episodes on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. insidetheshoulder.com

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