William M Weiss

08/10/2026

I love bones. This article reveals how fascinating and complicated bone biology and physiology are. It’s a bit long… but it goes deep.

I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. I have fixed hundreds of fractures. I have operated on spines, hips, and wrists weakened by osteoporosis. And in my experience, almost nobody understands what a bone actually is, its role in our overall health, or why it fails.

Most people think of bone the way they think of the steel frame of a building. Static and structural. Either it’s intact, or it’s broken.

This mental model is wrong, and understanding why it is wrong is the foundation for understanding how to actually protect yourself.

Your skeleton is not a fixed structure. It is a living tissue that is constantly being renewed. Right now, specialized cells are dissolving small sections of your bone, while other cells are rebuilding them. This process never stops. It runs continuously from birth until death. And when it falls out of balance — for any of several well-understood reasons — bone loss begins. Let’s get into this…

https://howardluksmd.substack.com/p/your-bones-are-far-more-complicated?selection=0670161b-2cec-4370-8dea-604b78419761

08/05/2026

What an honour to support the Galveston Sand Crabs in their first season… what a run! Looking forward to next year!! UTMB Orthopaedic Surgery UTMB PT/OT Galveston UTMB Health

08/01/2026

07/29/2026

The 2026 Season is here. Galveston, TX, let’s show up and show out!

07/11/2026

A gift from a patient? A promise of job security? Can’t it be both?! 😬

07/08/2026

Galveston's medical school opened its doors in 1891 with a young, ambitious faculty, twenty three total students, and rooms so bare of equipment they were practically empty.
The state had voted for it, though not by much of a margin in some minds. In 1881, Texans went to the polls to decide where the new state medical school would go, and Galveston beat out Houston by a landslide, seventy percent of the vote, on the strength of being one of the busiest ports in the country at the time. With state funding secured, the job of designing a medical school worthy of that vote fell to Nicholas Clayton, who didn't simply start sketching. He traveled north and east first, touring established medical colleges to understand what a building like this actually needed, then came home and raised a massive Romanesque structure out of red pressed brick, red Texas granite, and sandstone, giving it a color so distinctly ruddy that everybody just started calling it Old Red instead of its real name.
For its first decade, Old Red was the entire medical school, one building holding every classroom, every lab, every ounce of the university's ambition. Then came September of 1900, and the storm that nearly erased the whole island. Clayton rode it out in Galveston and came out the other side stunned to find that Old Red, badly damaged but still standing, had survived when so much of his life's work and so much of the city around it had not. The state responded by rallying behind the wrecked campus with real money for the first time, repairing the building so thoroughly that one professor admitted the school was actually in better shape by the end of 1901 than it had been before the storm ever hit. Even the hurricane's damage to the roof turned into an unexpected gift, opening space for skylights the dissection room had wanted from the very beginning.
Old Red kept teaching students for decades after that, surviving flood, storm, and the slow creep of newer buildings rising up around it, until it stood as the oldest medical school building west of the Mississippi River. In 2008, Hurricane Ike put six feet of water through it, and once again, it was repaired rather than abandoned.
A building that began with almost nothing inside it has spent more than a century proving it was never going anywhere.

06/10/2026

Express line through 🇨🇦 Customs… Canadian Orthopaedic Association UTMB Orthopaedic Surgery