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Adolescent Girl Tibial Plateau Intercondylar Eminence Fracture Congenital Femoral Trochlear Dysplasia Which Condition to Treat First? Over-Treatment Lack of Informed Consent Outcome Misrepresentation Financial ExploitationA teenage girl was suspected of having a tibial plateau intercondylar eminence fracture, yet the hospital focused on treating her congenital femoral trochlear dysplasia. Her parents were unsure which direction to take.
No treatment has been initiated so far.
First, an intercondylar eminence fracture of the tibial plateau represents a genuine injury. Since a CT scan was performed at Hospital C, the parents should have directly asked the doctor to confirm in writing whether a fracture was present. Second, a shallow femoral trochlea does not automatically indicate the need for corrective surgery. If a doctor believes surgery is warranted, they should clearly document the recommendation in writing. If the doctor is willing to provide a handwritten note, the handwriting should be legible. If the doctor is unwilling to write clearly, the family can choose to see another physician. Third, a shallow femoral trochlea primarily increases the risk of falls. The parents noted that their 14-year-old daughter had never shown any particular tendency to fall or sustain leg injuries. This suggests that corrective surgery for the femoral trochlea is not an urgent priority. There appears to be a potential issue here. If the intercondylar eminence is not actually fractured, doctors may worry they will lose the opportunity to perform surgery. This could lead them to downplay or obscure the fracture question in order to steer the family toward femoral trochlear corrective surgery. Bilateral femoral trochlear procedures represent a significant source of revenue for orthopedic departments.
The parents contacted this website once while seeking care. This contact is what enabled them to avoid proceeding with femoral trochlear corrective surgery. Otherwise, when doctors present their recommendations in a confident and authoritative manner, most patients and families find it very difficult to decline.
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This matters profoundly. For the first time, ordinary people can access unfiltered accounts directly from patients describing what treatments succeeded or failed — without a physician standing between the patient and the audience to frame, narrate, or interpret every detail. It is the difference between letting individuals speak for themselves and always requiring someone else to speak on their behalf or remain present to "explain" their words. Allowing patients to share their own medical records represents a genuinely new form of transparency. The limitation, of course, is that patients are not trained medical writers; their raw stories can sometimes appear disorganized or invite criticism. Our limited role is simply to help organize and present that information clearly, without injecting clinical judgment or altering the underlying facts.
Today, only licensed doctors and medical institutions are generally permitted to publish, narrate, comment on, or pass judgment on treatment cases. This creates an exclusive system in which only insiders control the narrative. It is comparable to insisting that only the restaurant owner may publicly discuss the quality of their own establishment — while simultaneously allowing only a professional "restaurant guild" to review any restaurant at all. Patients and their families are effectively sidelined from the conversation about their own experiences.
That is how the current system operates. We are here to change it.