By Linda Satter
Just two and a half weeks after Thomas Frazier, M.D., underwent a total knee replacement as the first surgical patient at The Orthopaedic & Spine Hospital at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), he was back to seeing patients in his orthopaedic clinic.
By the third week, he was performing surgery at the very hospital where he was treated.
The UAMS orthopaedic hand surgeon acknowledged that if he wasn’t able to perform surgery while seated, it probably would have taken another two or three weeks before he was back at the operating table.
Still, the degree of improvement he experienced in such a short time was a testament to the confidence he asserted weeks earlier, when he offered to be the first surgical patient at the new facility.
