Clinical activity · Shoulder & Elbow
Rotator Cuff: Five Decision Points
Five patients with rotator cuff pathology, each paired with a plausible recommendation. Some of the recommendations are right. Some are confidently wrong in ways that are easy to miss. One is a question medicine hasn't settled.
5 clinical cases · ~12 min · 0.25 CME
What you'll work through
- Separate the atraumatic degenerative tear that does well without surgery from the acute traumatic tear that shouldn't wait.
- Recognise when a cuff tear is no longer repairable, and what the imaging that tells you looks like.
- Apply the placebo-controlled evidence on subacromial decompression to a patient who looks like a textbook impingement.
- Say out loud where the evidence runs out and the decision becomes a judgment call.
How it runs
Five short cases. Each one ends with a recommendation — the kind a model or a colleague might give you.
You rate it before you see anyone else's answer. That's the whole point: an anchored judgment isn't worth recording.
Then you see how clinicians, surgeons, and subspecialists answered, what the evidence says, and where medicine genuinely doesn't agree.
Your responses are recorded de-identified. How we handle your judgment