OrthoWorld sat down with Kinomatic Chief Medical Officer Andrew B. Wickline, M.D., for a wide-ranging Q&A on why joint replacement recovery is overdue for a rethink.
A knee and hip surgeon for nearly three decades, Dr. Wickline built his practice around a question most surgeons never ask out loud: whether patients really need hundreds of opioid pills to recover from a joint replacement. His answer became a set of evidence-based protocols, a national nonprofit he founded called March2aMillion, and now the recovery approach he is bringing to Kinomatic as Chief Medical Officer.
In the conversation, Dr. Wickline reframes where recovery is actually decided. A joint replacement takes about an hour. The weeks around it, six before and twelve after, add up to more than 3,000 hours that the industry mostly leaves unsupported. Closing that gap, he argues, is where better outcomes come from.
He also explains what changed his mind on patient-specific 3D planning, how virtual reality lets a surgeon rehearse a case the way a pilot rehearses in a simulator, and why he believes recovery has been “the forgotten phase of joint replacement.”