Cory Calendine, M.D.

08/27/2026

The second you see your MRI report, I bet you read it right there in the parking lot.

Degenerative changes. Complex tearing. Maybe bone on bone. It's easy to quickly decide you need surgery - based on your report alone.

Let's slow that down. Your report is a technical inventory, not a diagnosis and not a treatment plan.

Here is what patients are rarely told: a finding can be completely true and still not be the cause of your pain. In one study of adults aged 50 to 90, 61 percent of those with a meniscus tear on MRI had no knee pain in the previous month.

Bring your report to your appointment. Absolutely bring it. Just don't let it decide anything before you get there.

https://youtu.be/kIwHRZ8LF88

08/26/2026

Paid For In Cornmeal. She Spent 80 Years Paying It Back.

Born the 4th of 12 children on January 19, 1946, in a one room cabin in the East Tennessee mountains. Her mother sang Appalachian ballads over the housework. She was on Knoxville television by 10 and on the Grand Ole Opry stage by 13. She left for Nashville the morning after her high school graduation and spent the next 7 decades writing songs. That is the part she wanted emphasized. She sold more than 100 million records and told anyone who asked that the songs were the legacy and everything else was built on top of them. 9 to 5 made her a movie star and handed working women an anthem. Dollywood turned her hometown into an economy. Her production company financed an Oscar winning AIDS documentary in 1989, at the height of the stigma, and kept her name off the poster.
She was married to Carl Dean for 58-yrs and almost nobody ever saw him. She kept her business in her own hands. She kept her politics to herself. She gave away so much money that she never landed on a billionaire list, and she declined to say how much. In 2022 she was handed $100 million to direct wherever she wanted, on the strength of what she had done for children and literacy. In February of this year, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville took her name. This carousel collects just a few of the things she did for others, from the sack of cornmeal that paid for her birth to the gift nobody found out about until the day after she died. Dolly Parton passed on August 25, 2026, at 80, in a Nashville hospital, and the tributes started before the day was over.
🙏 Thank you Dolly for the songs and a masterclass on how to live life

PAID IN CORNMEAL

The debt never stayed theoretical. In 1997 she and her park put $100,000 into a birthing center at Fort Sanders Sevier Medical Center. Ten years later she headlined a benefit that raised $500,000, matched by $250,000 each from two of her own businesses, and that million dollars helped build LeConte Medical Center, which opened in her home county in 2010. Inside it are the Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services and the Dolly Parton Birthing Unit, which is maternity care in the same mou

08/26/2026

"Do I have to sleep on my back with a wedge pillow?" I hear this question constantly — and it reveals one of the most common sleep mistakes I see after hip replacement: following precautions that were never yours to begin with.

The old rules — lie flat on your back for six weeks, strap your legs into a wedge pillow, never sleep without a pillow between your knees — come from an earlier era of posterior hip replacement. Today, with modern surgical techniques, those blanket restrictions have largely disappeared. I don't know many surgeons who still mandate the wedge, including those who prefer the posterior approach.

I perform the anterior approach for nearly all hip replacements, and do not require a pillow between the knees for any of my patients. If it feels good, use it. If you find yourself fighting it all night, you have my permission to let it go. It's a comfort tool, not a medical precaution.

Here's the point that matters: if you're forcing yourself into a sleeping position you hate because of a rule nobody actually gave you, you're losing sleep for no reason — and quality sleep is when your body does its best healing.

Always confirm your specific precautions with your own surgeon. Full video linked below.

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08/24/2026

Recognize Your Meniscus Tear?

A torn meniscus is not one diagnosis - it’s at least eight.

When your MRI report reads “meniscus tear,” that phrase alone tells us very little about what happens next. (3) basic details decide that: shape of the tear, its size, and where it sits.

Shape matters because of how the meniscus is built. It is roughly 75% collagen, and those fibers are organzed in a ring around the joint. That architecture is what turns body weight into tension the tissue can carry. Cut the ring in one direction and it keeps working, but cut it in another and it can stop carrying load entirely, even when every bit of tissue is still visible on the scan.

Location matters mainly because of blood. In adults, only the outer portion of your meniscus is vascularised, roughly the outer 1/3. Tissue in that zone can often heal and hold a stitch. The inner meniscus has no vessels at all - identical tear pattern is a repair in one zone vs. trim in the other.

Size matters because it predicts behavior. Short peripheral tears are often silent + occasionally heal on their own. Longer tears are far more likely to be unstable, catch, and to stay symptomatic.

More than 75% of patients w/ symptomatic have a known injury in that same knee. Meniscus you keep is load your cartilage never has to absorb. For detecting a torn meniscus MRI provides ~93% sensitivity and 88% specificity. What imaging cannot tell you is whether the tear it found is the reason your knee hurts - that answer comes from history, examination, and a conversation.

Swipe through for the eight patterns and what each one means for treatment.

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These (2) rules have anatomy behind them worth knowing.

Blood reaches the meniscus from a capillary plexus fed by the medial and lateral geniculate arteries, which anastomose around the joint. That supply penetrates only the outermost portion of the tissue. Radiology literature puts the vascularized peripheral band at roughly 15 percent of the meniscus. Everything central to it is fed by joint fluid alone.

Fiber direction is the second rule, and it explains an asymmetry most patients neve

08/24/2026

"When can I sleep on my side?"

It is the question I hear most from hip replacement patients, and almost all of them ask it before surgery.

The answer surprises people. After an anterior hip replacement, it is whenever it is comfortable. Not week six. Not after some checkpoint.

Here is why. Anterior means front, so the incision sits over the front of the hip, roughly where a front pocket would be. Nothing on the side, nothing behind. When you roll over at two in the morning, you are not lying on your incision.

Back, side, stomach, curled up: all fine.

In this new video I walk through the five sleep mistakes I see most often in recovery, starting with the retired precautions that patients still arrive carrying. Most of what makes sleep hard after a hip replacement has nothing to do with your hip at all.

Watch here:

"When can I sleep on my side?" That question come...

08/23/2026

What Happens When the Operating Room Starts Shaking?

4:27 in the afternoon. Tuesday, July 28. Kumamoto, Japan. Watch the room move. The lights. The ceiling. The carts. Now watch what does not move. The hands.
When a patient is open in front of you, your job is to become the most stable object in that building. Cover the wound. Hold every instrument still. Anything that hits the floor is gone from the sterile field. Count what is left, ride out the shaking, and keep going. Walking away from an open incision can be more dangerous than staying in a shaking room.
The quake registered magnitude 7.1 on the Japan Meteorological Agency scale and reached 7, the highest level, on Japan’s seismic intensity scale. Water mains failed across the region and tens of thousands of households lost running water. Weeks later, thousands of people were still living in shelters. Inside that hospital, the operations already underway were carried through to a safe finish. Not luck or heroics, the video demonstrates courage, training, dedication - and likely a team that had rehearsed for failures long before the failure arrived.
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