Today Dr Lawton was back in the office and I observed him in clinic again. I also got started on my project and we were able to formalize the process. Before I got started, Dr Lawton told me about how he wanted me to go about things in the survey, and said that first I would need to find some sort of test that would "score" the patients' symptoms post-op. This project will be a very useful project for the practice, because hip arthroscopy follow-up data is not very common due to the fact that this procedure (specifically in the hip) is relatively new. My first step to finding this "score" was to go to the American Journal of Sports Medicine Website, and research hip arthroscopy, to compare different types of methods for follow-up. It turned out that there is actually a test called the Harris hip score, which has been used for scope patients in the past, and is what I will use to conduct my surveys. I'm really excited to finally get to work on this project; because it is a little-reseached subject in sports medicine, this information could not only help Dr Lawton's practice, it could be published in an article in a journal on a regional or even national level, which would be incredible. It will be interesting to see how much I'll be able to do with this project.
Tomorrow I'll be observing Dr Lawton in the OR and continuing my p
