Shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand: diagnosis, treatment, and surgery of the upper extremities | Alton Barron, M.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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My guest this week is Alton Barron. Alton is a board certified, fellowship trained shoulder, elbow and hand surgeon with clinical practices in both Austin and New York City. He specializes in both routine and complex problems of the upper limb. Alton is also my surgeon. Some of you may recall, I had shoulder surgery in March of 2022, and I've kind of documented that recovery process along the way and promised to do kind of a deep dive on the upper extremity. In this episode, we focus our entire conversation on the upper limb, going from the elbow, the shoulder, to the hand and the wrist, as well as the nerves located throughout that track. Now for each of these, Alton goes through the structure, the anatomy, the various things that may cause pain and injury, and how and when to think about surgical interventions.
In addition to our conversation in the podcast, Alton runs through what a typical physical exam looks like for each patient. And this is really important. In the field of orthopedics, certainly surgeons rely on imaging studies. The MRI of the elbow, the shoulder, whatever.
But any good orthopedist I know has always said the same thing, which is the exam and the symptoms matter usually more than what the image shows. So in that sense, it's very important to understand those things. It's also something that you can even do on yourself to kind of help understand if something you're feeling is indeed problematic or maybe it's just gonna get better over time. Due to the type of discussion that we've had here and the exams that he does, this is probably going to be the one episode that if you're not used to watching on video, you do watch on video. Also given the length of the podcast, I think it's like over four hours or in that ballpark. And to make it more digestible, we've broken it out into some very specific videos, including and isolating the sections of the shoulder, the elbow, hand, wrist, and the innervation, as well as isolating the videos of just the various exams that Alton does to demonstrate on me. Now, you can find all of these videos on the show notes page or on our YouTube page. Now, lastly, one other thing that comes up in this interview and it's something that Alton is very passionate about is a foundation that he started called The Musician Treatment Foundation. This is a nonprofit that provides direct orthopedic shoulder surgery hand interventions along with non-surgical care to uninsured and underinsured musicians. This is something Alton is incredibly passionate about as he is also a musician. You'll hear him talk about the amazing work that he's done so far, where they want to go next, and basically how they're putting funds to you. Specifically, the foundation has their big annual event in Austin coming up on December 2nd. So if you're local to Austin, please check it out. And if you're not local to Austin, which many of you probably aren't, please head over to their website, www.mtfusa.org, where you can learn more about it and get involved if it's of interest to you. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Alton Barron.
Alton, so great to finally be sitting down with you. We talked about this even before you operated on me, which is at the time of this recording, I think we're coming up on seven months. But this is a topic that I can't tell you how many times I get asked about this by my patients.
And I don't know, in some ways, medicine is so siloed. You think, well, I did general surgery, surely I know something about orthopedics, but the reality of it is, outside of trauma, and even in the most basic sense, I know very little about orthopedics. And I think that's probably true for a lot of doctors, primary care and otherwise. And then how much more is that true for patients?