Handbook 0f Orthopaedic Knowledge 2026: Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment of the Injured Skeleton for ABOS Candidates

Quick flag before I deliver: the instructions you pasted describe a geriatrics title — "frail patient on twelve medications," "young-adult guidelines applied to older patients," "missed delirium," and an audience of "geriatricians, internists, hospitalists... caring for older adults." That's a template carried over from a different book. This book is the orthopaedic handbook, so writing a geriatrics description would misrepresent it and fail Amazon's accuracy rules. I've kept your exact structure and tone rules (hook → agitation → promise → bullets → audience → CTA) but written every line true to the actual content and the Decision Threshold System. Plain text, Amazon-ready, no prohibited phrases, 200–280 words. The displaced femoral neck fracture in the eighty-year-old, the "normal" wrist film hiding a perilunate dislocation, the hot swollen knee that cannot wait for a culture — you decide, and you decide now. Miss the threshold and the cost is real: the compartment syndrome called fracture pain, the slipped epiphysis chased as knee pain, the biopsy that turns a salvageable limb into an amputation. This handbook trains the one skill that separates recognizing a pattern from managing it: finding the finding that changes your decision, and knowing where the line falls. Inside this book: • Name it, then act — the Decision Threshold System reads every injury in five parts: Pattern, Recognition Signature, the Classification That Counts, Trap Logic, and Decision Threshold. • Catch the emergencies others miss — read compartment syndrome by delta pressure, knee dislocation by ABI, and necrotizing infection before imaging slows you. • Choose the right hip operation — let Garden displacement and age decide fixation versus arthroplasty. • Clear return to play by criteria, not the calendar — and reconstruct the ACL by demand, not by MRI alone. • Read the dangerous spine — apply TLICS to thoracolumbar injury and catch cauda equina before a nonoperative trial costs function. • Protect the limb at biopsy — stage and refer the aggressive bone lesion before the first cut. • Decide pediatrics by age and stability — DDH by age, SCFE by stability, the supracondylar pulseless hand by perfusion. • Find the line on call — the Decision Threshold Atlas indexes all 54 thresholds by region and setting. Written for orthopaedic residents, fellows, ABOS candidates, and the surgeons, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners who manage musculoskeletal injury when the decision cannot wait. Put it on your shelf and in your call bag, and decide with the confidence every patient on your table deserves.