What Happened to the Rubbing Elbows?

I just returned from the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) in New Orleans. Interestingly, this was my 30th consecutive AAAOS meeting and my first was actually in New Orleans. In this current era of so much information available online, in the cloud, or through email, or social media, some people think that meetings, where actual humans congregate, are less necessary. I strongly disagree. I recall that when I was more junior in my field I had opportunity upon opportunity to "rub elbows" with a wide range of other other orthopaedic surgeons. Some were famous, some were not, but all the interactions were valuable. They were at time spontaneous and other times planned.

I recall that at one meeting when I was just 2-3 years out of my fellowship I was at a continuing medical education course and was invited to a dinner. At the dinner were three world famous surgeons who were randomly sitting amongst us at the table. I sat down near one of them and heard story upon story of everything from their own experiences when they were just starting up to great words of wisdom. This kind of rubbing elbows seems to be missing from our field and it is a great loss. In a world of testing every piece of data, judging success through numbers, continuing medical education online geared toward testing and structured in only outline form, gone are the days where you had access to a colleague outside of your institution, in a relaxed face-to-face conference setting where you can take an x-ray out of your portfolio and ask "Dr. X, what would you do with this?

Being an early adopter in online communication and education, people like me are partly to blame. The low cost option of a teleconference or video conference financially is more attractive than getting on a plane and going somewhere to speak to people. Over the years, I have volunteered for many different committees at the AAOS and my favorite committee was one that reviewed electronic media. Once a year the committee got together in person to discuss and review the video entries for presentation at the annual meeting. Those in-person meetings brought 10-12 orthopaedic surgeons from around the country together. I remain friends with many of them to this day. Now my committee involvement is squeezed into an 800 number conference call with some parties calling from their car while driving.

I always hoped that I would not become a dinosaur one day and maybe I sound like that now but in my daily life and career I am and have been a huge proponent of electronic media to improve human effort. Maybe the way we have evolved with video meetings, teleconferencing, non-real time communications have allowed us to keep up with the incredible amount of information out there. Maybe we are learning faster. Maybe our outcomes scores appear better. Maybe a few more articles can be published. But we don't know what we are missing with the now near extinct face-to-face spontaneous moments together so trust me on the rubbing elbows.