How surgeons design treatment recommendations in orthopaedic surgery

This paper examines how orthopaedic surgeons skilfully design treatment recommendations to display awareness of what individual patients are anticipating or seeking, and suggests limits to those efforts. It adds leverage to our parallel work by demonstrating that even when surgeons incorporate considerations of recipient design to 'fit' recommendations to patients' displayed orientations, an asymmetry between recommendations for vs. not for surgery remains: recommendations for surgery are generally proposed early, in relatively simple and unmitigated form, and as stand-alone options.